Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Afromodernisms – Black Modernist Practice in Contemporary Context
- I Paris, blackness and the avant-garde
- II Afromodern Caribbean
- 4 Modernism, Anthropology, Africanism and the Self: Hurston and Herskovits on/in Haiti
- 5 Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity
- 6 ‘Forget Paris?’ – Transnationalism in the Spiritual Works of Karl Parboosingh
- III Harlem: Metaphors of modern experience
- Afterword: Stormy Weather and Afromodernism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
5 - Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity
from II - Afromodern Caribbean
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Afromodernisms – Black Modernist Practice in Contemporary Context
- I Paris, blackness and the avant-garde
- II Afromodern Caribbean
- 4 Modernism, Anthropology, Africanism and the Self: Hurston and Herskovits on/in Haiti
- 5 Asymmetrical Possessions: Zora Neale Hurston and the Gendered Fictions of Black Modernity
- 6 ‘Forget Paris?’ – Transnationalism in the Spiritual Works of Karl Parboosingh
- III Harlem: Metaphors of modern experience
- Afterword: Stormy Weather and Afromodernism
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
It is the lack of symmetry which makes Negro dancing so difficult for white dancers to learn. The abrupt and unexpected changes. The frequent change of key and time are evidences of this quality […] Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.
Zora Neale Hurston, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’Zora Neale Hurston begins her 1934 essay, ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, with an invocation of ‘drama’ – not of her own theatre pieces, but of the ‘drama’ of black linguistic practice:
Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama. Everything is acted out. Unconsciously for the most part of course. There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of life. No little moment passes unadorned.
This brief and wholly unframed introduction to the drama of blackness is also littered, as is the quote on ‘Asymmetry’ above, with many of the cringe-worthy components of primitivist racial discourse, most notably the continual construction of an evolutionary progress narrative situating black folks as the original and stagnant point from which modernity, and its linguistic and political forms, develop.
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- Information
- AfromodernismsParis, Harlem and the Avant-Garde, pp. 126 - 143Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013