Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston wrote her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, while in Haiti on a trip funded by a Guggenheim fellowship to research the region's transatlantic folk and religious culture; this work grounded what would become her ethnography Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. The essays in Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" persuasively demonstrate that Hurston's study of Haitian Voudoun informed the characterization, plotting, symbolism, and theme of her novel. Much in the way that Voudoun and its North American derivative Voodoo are syncretic religions, Hurston's fiction enacts a syncretic, performative practice of reference, freely drawing upon Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, and Haitian Voudoun mythologies for its political, aesthetic, and philosophical underpinnings. Zora Neale Hurston, Haiti, and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" connects Hurston's work more firmly to the cultural and religious flows of the African diaspora and to the literary practice by twentieth-century American writers of subscripting in their fictional texts symbols and beliefs drawn from West and Central African religions. Introduction: Zora Neale Hurston, Seven Weeks In Haiti, And Their Eyes Were Watching God / La Vinia Delois Jennings -- Remembering The Sacred Tree: Black Women, Nature, And Voodoo In Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse And Their Eyes Were Watching God / Rachel Stein -- The Myth And Ritual Of Ezili Freda In Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God / Derek Collins -- Vodou Imagery, African American Tradition, And Cultural Transformation In Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God / Daphne Lamothe -- Black Cat Bone And Snake Wisdom: New Orleanian Hoodoo, Haitian Voodoo And Rereading Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God / Pamela Glenn Menke -- Papa Legba, Ouvrier Barriere Por Moi Passer: Esu In Their Eyes And Zora Neale Hurston's Diasporic Modernism / Edward M. Pavlic -- Come And Gaze On A Mystery: Oya As Rain-bringing I Of Zora Neale Hurston's Atlantic Storm Walkings / Keith Cartwright -- Legba In The House: African Cosmology In Their Eyes Were Watching God / Mawuena Logan -- Voodoo And The Black Vernacular As Weapons Of Resistance: Liberation Strategies In Their Eyes Were Watching God / Babacar M'baye -- All Those Signs Of Possession: Love And Death In Their Eyes Were Watching God / Cynthia Ward -- Zora Neale Hurston's Vodun-christianity Juxtaposition: Theological Pluralism In Their Eyes Were Watching God / Nancy Ann Watanabe. Edited By La Vinia Delois Jennings. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.