Title: Zora Neale Hurston - Anthropology - Oxford Bibliographies
Headings: 
Zora Neale Hurston
by
Oneka LaBennett
LAST MODIFIED: 28 November 2016
DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567-0160
Introduction
General Overviews
How to Subscribe

Content: These overlapping approaches have meant that her work resonates with and has informed scholars from multiple disciplines. As McClaurin 2001 and Visweswaran 1994 (cited under Black Feminist and Women of Color Anthropology) reveal, Hurston deeply impacted feminists and black anthropologists. Yet, Hurston’s anthropological work remains outside the field’s canon, which is still largely centered on the legacy of white men. Although Hurston’s contemporaries criticized her for explicitly keeping politics out of her work and for neglecting to engage directly with racism, McClaurin 2001 notes that a generation of feminist and black anthropologists working within the realms of scholar-activism, native anthropology, and applied anthropology have traced their lineage through Hurston. Experimental trends in feminist anthropology in the late 1990s drew on Hurston to explore blurred lines between fiction and ethnography, and the possibilities of “autoethnography” (blending autobiography and ethnography). Visweswaran 1994 (cited under Black Feminist and Women of Color Anthropology) argues that Hurston used autobiography and fiction to enrich her anthropological studies, while also using ethnography to perfect a novelistic voice that drew on the cultural worlds of real-life African Americans. Like Hurston’s own approach, the vast scholarship drawing on her work crosses genres and disciplinary scopes—thus, in many ways, defying categorization. Although the citations that follow are not placed in multiple categories, the sections are often porous and have a good deal of overlap. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. 1993.