- Jan 2023
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She was openly critical of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. “When Brown comes out, her point is ‘I don’t want to have to force someone to associate with me,’” Strain says. Today she would probably be considered a libertarian.
Interesting...
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It was only when Walker published the essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (later titled “Looking for Zora”) in Ms. magazine in 1975 that Hurston’s personal renaissance was launched.
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“She is likely our earliest Black female ethnographic filmmaker,” says Strain, who also teaches documentary history at Wesleyan University.
Link to Robert J. Flaherty
Where does she sit with respect to Robert J. Flaherty and Nanook of the North (1922)? Would she have been aware of his work through Boaz? How is her perspective potentially highly more authentic for such a project given her context?
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She undertook some of her research trips under the patronage of Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy socialite and philanthropist who liked to bankroll artists of the Harlem Renaissance — under her strict conditions, which included a precise accounting of every cent.
The "strict conditions" and "every cent" sound a bit oppressive as called out here, though most funders would/should do this sort of thing.
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PBS “American Experience” documentary, “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space,” which premieres Tuesday on PBS and will be available thereafter on PBS.org.
Tags
- segregation
- documentaries
- media studies
- philanthropy
- PBS
- quote
- read
- Alice Walker
- Zora Neale Hurston
- ethnographic filmmakers
- Harlem Renaissance
- want to watch
- popular culture
- cultural anthropology
- Robert J. Flaherty
- Charlotte Osgood Mason
- Tracey Heather Strain
- Brown vs. Board of Education
- American Experience
- Nanook of the North
- libertarianism
- 1922
- Ms. Magazine
Annotators
URL
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- Sep 2020
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indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu
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I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries
Note how Emerson's "transparent eyeball" slips in through the back door here as Zora becomes "cosmic." Very interesting to think that the ecstatic mode that she enters via jazz opens up the kind of transcendence that Emerson derives from nature, from the "bare common."
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- Jul 2020
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indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu
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The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.
What's ZNH getting at here? What claim is she making about whiteness and the problems of "possessing" it, in the words of George Lipsitz
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- Feb 2019
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indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu
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The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.
Surprising echo of Emerson's "Nature" here, no?
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Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
Pathological whiteness. There's a hilarious moment in Kiese Laymon's recent Heavy, in which Laymon's college friend, noticing his being depressed, counsels him not to take antidepressants. He tells Laymon that he took them and "felt like a white dude" until he quit.
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I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
Spoiler alert, but we'll see Claudia Rankine chew on this line later in the term.
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Slavery is sixty years in the past.
Now that chattel slavery is about 150 years in the past, how does this passage read? Where does this idea place Hurston in political terms?
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I do not be long to the sobbing school of Negrohood
How is Hurston positioning herself in cultural terms here? What does she mean by the "sobbing school"? Can you think of an example?
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I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown–warranted not to rub nor run.
What does she mean that she "was not Zora" in Jacksonville? How does this relate to her claims of being "owned" by Eatonville in the prior paragraph?
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I remember the very day that I became colored.
Compare to Du Bois's parallel but very different account.
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got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.
Very different perspective on the gaze v look problem Du Bois wrestles with.
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