A fascinating look at a pivotal period in Zora Neale Hurston's life
that reimagines her complicated legacy. Zora Neale Hurston, an
anthropologist and writer best known for her classic novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God, led a complicated life often marked by
tragedy and contradictions. When both she and her writing fell out
of favor after the Harlem Renaissance, she struggled not only to
regain an audience for her novels but also to simply make ends
meet. In The Chase and Ruins, Sharony Green uncovers an
understudied but important period of Hurston's life: her stay in
Honduras in the late 1940s. On the eve of an awful accusation that
nearly led to her suicide, Hurston fled to Honduras in search of a
lost Mayan ruin. During her yearlong trip south of the US border,
she appears to have never found the ruin she was chasing. But by
escaping the Jim Crow south to Honduras, she avoided racist
violence in the United States while still embracing her
privilege—and power—as a US citizen in postwar Central America.
While in Honduras, Hurston wrote Seraph on the Suwanee, her final
novel and her only book to feature white characters, in an attempt
to appeal to Hollywood's growing appetite for "crackerphilia"
(stories about poor white folks) and to finally secure herself some
financial stability. In a letter to her editor, Hurston wrote that
in Honduras, she may not have found the Mayan ruin she was looking
for, but she finally found herself. Hurston's experience in
Honduras has much to teach us about Black women's lives and the
thorny politics of postwar America as well as America's long and
complicated entanglement with Central America. In an attempt to
find historical meaning in an extraordinary woman's conceptions of
herself in a changing world, Green unearths letters, diaries,
literary writings, research reports, and other archival materials.
The Chase and Ruins encourages us to reckon with and reimagine
Hurston's fascinating life in all of its complexity and
contradictions.
General
| Imprint: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
|
| Country of origin: |
United States |
| Release date: |
October 2023 |
| Authors: |
Sharony Green
|
| Dimensions: |
229 x 152 x 19mm (L x W x T) |
| Pages: |
192 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-1-4214-4666-0 |
| Categories: |
Books
|
| LSN: |
1-4214-4666-9 |
| Barcode: |
9781421446660 |
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