A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM: Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Marie Claire, The Seattle Times, Lit Hub, Bustle, and New York Magazine’s Vulture Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr. Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author. “One of the greatest writers of our time.”—Toni Morrison You Don’t Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world’s most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston’s writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people’s inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture—"modif[ying] the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly religion.” White supremacy prevents the world from seeing or completely recognizing Black people in their full humanity and Hurston made it her job to lift the veil and reveal the heart and soul of the race. These pages reflect Hurston as the controversial figure she was—someone who stated that feminism is a mirage and that the integration of schools did not necessarily improve the education of Black students. Also covered is the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor. Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer’s work, You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer’s development and a window into her world and mind.

Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr. Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author. "One of the greatest writers of our time."--Toni Morrison One of the most acclaimed artists of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was a gifted novelist, playwright, and essayist. Drawn from three decades of her work, this anthology showcases her development as a writer, from her early pieces expounding on the beauty and precision of African American art to some of her final published works, covering the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing a white doctor. Among the selections are Hurston's well-known works such as "How It Feels to be Colored Me" and "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience." The essays in this essential collection are grouped thematically and cover a panoply of topics, including politics, race and gender, and folkloric study from the height of the Harlem Renaissance to the early years of the Civil Rights movement. Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer's work, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer's development and a window into her world and time.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 We met a man named Longfellow, who was begging for money to give to homeless children. We gave him a dime, but he requested more pennies. We gave him six cents, and he began to sing: These be gray days and a sweet singer in Israel is to be highly honored. #2 We were not really hungry, but we went to Odds and Ends anyway. The food was delicious, but atmosphere was the most attractive thing about the place. There was a peace and a calm that fell like a benediction on the guests. #3 High John de Conquer was a man, and he was a mighty man. He was not a natural man in the beginning, but a whisper, a will to hope, and a wish to find something worthy of laughter and song. He walked the winds and moved fast. #4 John de Conquer was a bottom-fish. He was deep. He had the wisdom tooth of the East in his head. He knew that nothing could live on human flesh and prosper. He knew that nothing would live on human flesh and prosper if the people knew about it.

Drawing on the works of ten scholars and public intellectuals ranging over 200 years, this book foregrounds ways of knowing that include but go beyond the cognitive. The book explores the work of Harriet Martineau, Jane Addams, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Deloria, M. N. Srinivas, Barbara Myerhoff, Orlando Fals Borda, Ronald Takaki and Nawal El Saadawi. The author discusses their multifaceted ethnographic practices and argues that such practices are still under-acknowledged in contemporary research in comparison to cognition and categorization. These scholars were outsiders to their societies in a variety of ways. They highlighted power imbalances in the perception and representation of one group by another and brought direct experience, emotion, narrative, imagination, recognition, self-reflection, activism and cultural humility into their writing, in addition to rationality. The book engages with the authors and their ideas in the context of their times and places. It also reclaims them as methodological predecessors, noting their contributions to what educational ethnography has been and what it could be in the future. Expanding the canon of social research history and providing insight into unique methodological forms, this text will be valuable for scholars and postgraduate students with interests in ethnography, as well as the history of research, anthropology and qualitative methods more broadly.

Iconic as a novelist and popular cultural figure, Zora Neale Hurston remains underappreciated as an anthropologist. Is it inevitable that Hurston’s literary authority should eclipse her anthropological authority? If not, what socio-cultural and institutional values and processes shape the different ways we read her work? Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall considers the polar receptions to Hurston’s two areas of achievement by examining the critical response to her work across both fields. Drawing on a wide range of readings, Freeman Marshall explores Hurston’s popular appeal as iconography, her elevation into the literary canon, her concurrent marginalization in anthropology despite her significant contributions, and her place within constructions of Black feminist literary traditions. Perceptive and original, Ain’t I an Anthropologist is an overdue reassessment of Zora Neale Hurston’s place in American cultural and intellectual life.

This book analyses historical, literary, and cultural shifts in African American literature from the 1920s-1930s.

This thesis examines how Blackness, as an ontological and relational response to Anti-Blackness, lives within a social-cultural-historical context through the theoretical lens of Afropessimism. The tenets of Afropessimism have informed my conceptual art practice through the mediums of black-and-white photography, installation, and film. Calling attention to the paradoxical themes of Blackness, the tensions between hypervisibility vs. invisibility, invisibility vs. illegibility, and Black social life and social death are raised for discussion. Through the investigation of the transformation of the Black body into mere flesh after the Transatlantic slave trade, systemic racism is expressed through exclusion and the use and misuse of language within frame of Black vernacular and white supremacy. It is through this personal and historical erasure, specifically within the framework of natal alienation, that my solo show, You Don't Know Us Negroes, named after Zora Neal Hurston's essay, is realized. The documentation of the landscape of the south is juxtaposed with the felt presence of the ancestral trauma through the perspective of critical fabulation.