| Popis: |
Harlem Renaissance writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston is known for her project of cultural retrieval through the study of African American folklore in the Southern states, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, especially, and the Caribbean. Eatonville, Florida, where she spent her childhood years, was the epicenter of her folkloric and cultural understandings. Mules and Men, the first study of African American folk traditions by an African American, retrieves a wide range of folklore materials, especially folktales, which constitute the collective memory of certain residents of Florida and Louisiana in the early decades of the twentieth century. Of the many topics covered in Mules and Men, the work can be understood in its treatment of religion, women and relationships, slavery, and language. Also, Hurston’s fictional works show a reliance on folklore and the foundational experience in Eatonville. She employs vernacular with a few strategic interests, one, to construct narratives that are centered on social, familial, and interpersonal relationships, such as marital situations; the other, to codify, performing the role of the anthropologist who collects folklore materials, but also realizes that vernacular voices had a level of authenticity. Hurston joined the academic circle of ethnographers and formed her own ethnological self, observing the relationships between men and women as they show gender and power considerations. |
