Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008. / Title from screen (viewed on July 1, 2008). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Jennifer Thorington Springer, Tom Marvin. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, August 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Texas, August, 2008. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English Language and Literature, August 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Liberty University, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. A.)--Florida State University, 2006. / Advisor: W.T. Lhamon, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 9, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 67 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Zora Neale Hurston’s literature involves dance and performance. What makes this a viable topic of inquiry is her texts often exhibit the performative, whether portraying culture or using dance and associated folk rituals to create complex meaning. Hurston’s use of black vernacular and storytelling evokes lyrical expression in "Their Eyes Were Watching God." African and Caribbean Diasporas in Hurston’s literature reflects primitive dance performances and folklore. This novel requires lyrical analysis. The storytelling feature of performance arts and reclamations of the body are present in Hurston’s text. In recent academic settings, the body has come to occupy a crucial place in literary and cultural texts and criticism. Hurston’s versatile material and anthropology techniques are instrumental in reshaping dance history. A new archetype for theorizing the body has surfaced, where the body of text is performance and lyrical expression.

This paper gives critical attention to the nature versus caution porch conversation in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, arguing that this is a legitimate addition to the anthropological discussion of nature versus culture. Addressing literary critics as well as scholars of the environmental humanities and of multispecies studies, I argue that Hurston's nature-caution discussion is a helpful epistemology which Hurston employs throughout her novel to suggest a single, unified way of understanding the human and nonhuman.

This thesis involves a theoretical study of the dynamics of cultural interaction as represented in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's A Grain of Wheat, Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine and Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Ema Brodber's Myal. Specifically, it considers the role that a dialogue between critical theory (post-colonial and feminist) and literary practice can play in the evaluation of two distinct conceptions of cultural difference: identity politics, understood as positing an essential binaristic difference between an ethnic or gendered Self and Other, and hybridity theory, which conceives of Self and Other as mutually constitutive and inescapably interconnected. While this thesis demonstrates some of the ways in which hybridity theory can revise and expand contemporary critical readings of the novels under study, it also demonstrates how literature can problematize the universalizing claims of both hybridity theory and identity politics, thus stressing the importance of sociohistorical and literary/narrative contexts to the evaluation of strategies of resistance to colonial and/or patriarchal regimes. After an introductory chapter dealing with questions of theory, three subsequent chapters discuss themes of hybridity and cultural separatism in the novels by Ngugi, Hurston, and Brodber, respectively. Each of these latter chapters involves a detailed analysis of the colonial and/or patriarchal discourses represented in the particular novel or novels under study. These analyses include discussions of some of the ways in which dominant discourses attempt to co-opt cultural difference and impede equitable intercultural hybridizing exchange by polarizing Self and Other in a binaristic economy. Each chapter also considers the presence of internal contradictions in dominant discourses and the implications of such contradictions for a revolutionary politics. On the basis of these discussions, this thesis considers the relative efficacy of hybridity and identity politics as strategies of resistance, demonstrating that different contexts call for different approaches to revolutionary theory and practice. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

Since the 75th anniversary of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane in 2003, a growing number of journalists and historians writing about the disaster have incorporated Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God as part of the official historical record of the hurricane. These writers often border on depicting Their Eyes as the authentic experience of black migrant workers impacted by the hurricane and subsequent flood. Within the novel itself, however, Hurston theorizes on the potential epistemic violence that occurs when a piece of evidence—a photograph, fallen body, or verbal artifact—is used to judge a person. Without a person's ability to use self-representation to give an "understandin'" (7) to go along with the evidence, snapshots or textual evidence threaten to violently separate people from their prior knowledge of themselves. By offering the historical context of photographs of African Americans in the Post-Reconstruction South, I argue that Janie experiences this epistemic violence as a young girl when seeing a photograph of herself initiates her into the racial hierarchy of the South. A few decades later, while on trial for shooting her husband Tea Cake, Janie again faces epistemic violence when the evidence of Tea Cake's body is used to judge her and her marriage; however, by giving an understandin' to go along with the evidence through self-representation, Janie is able to clarify that which other forms of evidence distort and is able to go free. Modern texts appropriating Their Eyes run the risk of enacting epistemic violence on the victims of the hurricane, the novel, and history itself when they present the novel as the complete or authentic perspective of the migrant workers in the hurricane. By properly situating the novel as a historical text that offers a particular narrative of the hurricane rather than the complete or authentic experience of the victims, modern writers can honor Hurston's literary achievement without robbing the actual victims of the hurricane of their voice.