Posted on 01/06/2011 5:27:27 AM PST by Academiadotorg
A pair of Harvard professors are resurrecting the work of an African-American writer so politically incorrect that she was virtually bypassed in the rush to inaugurate variations of black studies programs—Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston. “She thought Reconstruction was a deplorable period, favored Booker T. Washington over W.E.B. Du Bois even decades after Washington’s death, and opposed the New Deal; in 1954 she also opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education,” Glenda R. Carpio and Werner Sollors write in The Chronicle Review.
Carpio and Sollors are professors of English and African and African American studies at Harvard. “Her major objections to Reconstruction, and later to Brown, were not that the problems they sought to solve were unimportant, but that the solutions sought to bring about change in the wrong way,” Carpio and Sollors explain of Hurston’s stance.
The two professors teach a course on Hurston’s work, comparing and contrasting it with that of her polar opposite, and personal nemesis, Richard Wright, author of Native Son. “She believed in empowering black individuals and communities to gain economic and social justice for themselves, instead of depending on white Northern liberals or the federal government,” Carpio and Sollors write of Hurston. “To her, Brown assumed the inferiority of black culture and life, imposing a supposedly more developed white culture on black people.”
“I am not tragically colored,” Hurston once declared. “There is no great sorrow damned up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes.”
“I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.”
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I have never heard of her, but that is not surprising considering her views. She has been successfully suppressed. I am looking forward to learning more about her.
Here’s another oeno t read about- America’s first female millionaire
a woman born to slave parents
http://www.ladelta65.org/places/CJ.Walker.htm
And Harvard profs are teaching her!
I’m supportive of this new area of study.
study
Unfortunately this study will never see the light of day.
Entrepreneur? Philanthropy?
These are NOT the traits that we what to promote in the socialist regime, especially to blacks! /sarc
I’m no Harvard prof, but I am an adjunct English instructor at a university. I always try to include Hurston’s powerful fiction on my syllabus. Her story “Sweat” always creates lots of class discussion. But don’t read it at night right before you go to sleep!
Now, I have not read her stuff, so have no personal opinion. All I can say is that everyone I have ever known who has talked about her, has been a Liberal. They just love that black culture. It makes them seem so tolerant.
I have always assumed that Liberals loved Hurston because A) She was black and B) She fit into the narrative that whites have done bad things to blacks. Perhaps that is wrong. Perhaps she wasn't like that at all. But I think she has largely been hijacked by people who just hate whitey.
If that is wrong, and if people are starting to pay attention to her real views, then that seems like good news.
bookmark
What does this sentence mean?
she is a terrific writer, much neglected. Her writing has more spirit and talent than most of the other writers of the period, either black or white.
read, ‘I Love Myself When I am Laughing’, and any other books of hers you can get. Spirited, humorous, sarcastic.
she was treated so badly by the black elitists of her time it will make you weep.
She offended the black -— and white -— elite by dissing Wright, who was a Communist. Shortly afterwards she could not sell anything she wrote, fell into poverty, and ended up working as a maid. Then the ten-year-old son of the white people for whom, she was a maid asccused her of molesting him (some suspect it was a put-up job -— I am sure it was)and that finished her. Even though is was later proven to be not true.
Her biography is worth reading. An object lesson that mere black girls had better not offend the eastern liberal elite.
But she went home to Florida and lived in an all-black community the rest of her life. Alice Walker wrote her biography and rescued her headstone and grave from weeds and neglect.
she was a terrific writer. A hell of a lot better than Wright.
Bookmark
His daughter Philippa Schuyler authored Who Killed the Congo? (New York: Devin Adair, 1962), a critical analysis of the Kennedy administration's policies in Africa.
A lot of the great damage done to the aspirations of Black Americans was done by some of their largest, so-called heroes like Du Bois, Richard Wright, and Paul Robeson. They were hardcore communists who steered Black thinking in the direction of big government. The terrible racial prejudice of their times warped their belief in America, and they turned to communism as their savior. The many times self-appointed successors to Du Bois, Wright, and Robeson were mostly hardcore leftists too. Too bad for them, and too bad for the black community which still suffers from their thoughts and anti-American actions.
I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it.
This will not set well with race card holders,she is a thinker who understands things.
She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, which I read in college.
It's a very good book, from a lot of different perspectives.
She's worth reading -- at least, this book is.
The protagonist is a black woman in post-Civil War times. She is beautiful and has "good hair," is strong, capable, and smarter than the people around her -- and as a result, she doesn't fit in anywhere. She can't get away from a toxic "black culture," and she has no access to "white culture." And she's a woman. So she's trapped. Hurston skewers all sorts of cultural pretensions, black and white.
It's one of those books that people can latch onto in ways that suit their own biases; I think liberals have latched onto it because it's a truly great piece of work, written by a black woman -- it's the author they care about, not the contents.
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