Secondary Source Reading
In his essay "Zora Neale Hurston: 'A Negro Way of Speaking,"" Henry Louis Gates Jr. says of
Hurston:
Virtually ignored after the early fifties, even by the Black Arts movement in the sixties, an
otherwise noisy and intense spell of black image- and myth-
making that rescued so many
black writers from
remaindered oblivion, Hurston embodied a
more or less harmonious
but nevertheless
problematic unity of opposites. It is this
complexity that refuses to lend
itself to the
glib categories of 'radical' or 'conservative, 'black' or '
Negro, 'revolutionary'
or 'Uncle
Tom'-categories of little use in literary
criticism. It is this same complexity,
embodied in her fiction, that, until Alice Walker
published her important essay ("In Search
of Zora Neale Hurston") in Ms. magazine in 1975, had made
Hurston's place in black
literary
history an ambiguous one at best.
7. With a small group, discuss and analyze Gates's interpretation of Hurston's contribution to
black literary history. Discuss what evidence he provides for his
interpretation and its validity.