| Increasingly, literary critics foreground such categories as "oppositionality," "subversion," and "transgression." While these terms carry enormous weight, we rarely agree on their meaning. Some critics locate literary oppositionality in specific textual properties, others in the act of narration itself, the social relationships mediated by storytelling. Storytelling, they argue, transforms the social relationships it mediates by reconstructing readers. But African-American and women's stories often are more skeptical, detailing narration's limitations as well as transformative potential.;Section I, "Fictions of Resistance," focuses on critical debates and exemplary texts of women's and African-American theory and literature (Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers," Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Linda Brent's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl). A central metaphor of Chapters Two and Three, "Opposing Stories" and "The Lion's Testimony," is the idea that narration performs a psychosocial "talking cure." An archeological imperative, I argue, characterizes feminist and Afro-American revisions of literary history, canons, and periodizations. Through comparable formulations of reading and speech, such theorists recuperate as subversive texts formerly seen as conservative or acquiescent.;Few such recuperations have been as phenomenal as the critical reevaluation of Hurston from apolitical opportunist who pandered to racist stereotypes to American literature's outstanding example of successful textual oppositionality. The Hurston phenomenon, I argue in Section II "The Case of Zora Neale Hurston," provides a means of diagnosing our own presuppositions. Recuperating Hurston as a model of resistance, I contend, has been accomplished at the expense of some of her most truly oppositional--and troubling--messages. By romanticizing her view of storytelling and relationship to social movements such as the Harlem Renaissance, we have occluded the very thing we seek to uncover. Chapter Four, "Zora WHO?" examines Hurston's changing reception and divided audiences. In Chapter Five, "Hurston and the Harlem Renaissance," I consider Hurston's complicated status as a double-outsider, alien to both mainstream culture and much of her own radical milieu. Chapter Six, "The Erotics of Talk," challenges prevailing readings of Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God by focusing on her revision of the romance. |
