“Tell ’Em Boy Bye”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Importance of Refusal

Abstract

Although she was intellectually outcasted during her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston and her “controversial” politics have been reclaimed by feminists (especially black feminists) since Alice Walker’s 1975 “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” first published in Ms. Magazine. In what Kristie Dotson calls a deliberate “act of inheritance,” I contribute to existing black feminist scholarship on the theme of self-respect in Hurston’s work by analyzing its relationship to acts of refusal and black spirituality within a contemporary context. By “self-respect,” I mean maintaining a positive valuation of the self (or one’s social group) that reflects one’s dignity. While there are many ways that self-respect can be achieved, as well as many degrees to which the self can be respected, I am interested in a special case: when self-respect mandates a refusal. I argue that reinterpreting Hurston’s racial politics as refusal, rather than conservatism, reveals the latent racism, disguised as regionalism, in popular liberal discourse. I advance this interpretation of Hurston’s position not to say this is the “real” Hurston (many Hurston scholars point out that she had many faces). Rather, through providing this alternative reading, I aim to provide resources for current problems black folks face today in Northern, white, liberal spaces.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.