Zora Neale Hurston's their eyes were watching God: A casebook. - book review

African American Review, Winter, 2001 by Daylanne K. English

Other Hurston scholars whose work has deepened and enlivened our understanding of the novel are also inevitably, but unfortunately, missing from the Casebook Nellie McKay, Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Priscilla Wald, Deborah Plant, Dolan Hubbard, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Karla Holloway, Molly Hite, and Cheryl Wall herself, to name just a few. Several of these scholars have written on a frequent aspect of Hurston criticism, and one under-represented in the collection--namely, her influence on other writers. Also missing is an extended representation of Hurston's own voice. Although "Zora Neale Hurston on Zora Neale Hurston" (1942) offers an effective sampling of Hurston's evasive autobiographical voice, readers might have benefitted still more from the inclusion of one of her essays, several of which could contribute significantly to an understanding of Their Eyes (perhaps "The Characteristics of Negro Expression" or "What White Publishers Won't Print").

But these are relatively minor absences in a collection so full of striking critical presences. The collection's two most recent essays, Carla Kaplan's "The Erotics of Talk" (1995) and Daphne Lamothe's "Voudou Imagery, African American Tradition and Cultural Transformation" (1999), represent an expansive moment in Hurston criticism--and perhaps in literary criticism as a whole. Hurston's fiction is now being considered from a wide range of perspectives: representations of the body, African diasporic and Caribbean thematics and cultural practices, cultural imperialism, the Federal Writers' Project, eugenics, the Blues, and Hurston's politics as well as her anthropological and other intellectual pursuits.

To quote the novel itself, as readers and critics of Their Eyes Were Watching God," 'we' uh mingled people.'" Cheryl Wall's Casebook on the novel does an admirable job of representing us.