Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall (review)

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• Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall
• Steven P. Garabedian

Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon. By Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall. The New Black Studies Series. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 252. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08710-3; cloth, $110.00, ISBN 978-0-252- 04496-0.)

Zora Neale Hurston was lost and then found in the U.S. literary canon. This valuable monograph by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall, Ain’t I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon, expands that process [End Page 645] of corrective finding to the realm of the social sciences. Freeman Marshall is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, with degrees and affiliations in women’s studies, anthropology, African American studies, and American studies. She brings the full range of her expertise to bear on this reframing of Hurston beyond the lauded, yet ultimately narrowing, status of literary icon and celebrity. Hurston’s intellect inspired inventive scholarship, not just accomplished fiction. Yet the same spirit and dynamism that was celebrated in a canonical work like Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) occasioned marginalization when it came to major ethnographies from the same period, such as Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). In the world of literature, Zora Neale Hurston is championed as authoritative, but in the world of anthropology (and its related field of folklore studies), Hurston has been dismissed as non-authoritative. Freeman Marshall highlights how Hurston, the novelist, is revered, and Hurston, the anthropologist, is relegated to novelty.

Hurston was a sensation in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s. She was prolific, publishing fiction and nonfiction to wide critical and popular attention. Her achievement was rewarded with private patronage (such as by the white philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason) and formal academic support, degrees, and mentorship (Franz Boas at Columbia University). Nevertheless, Hurston remained her own person and took her own intellectual and creative counsel. Freeman Marshall opens with Hurston’s prophetic statement in “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” from 1928: “It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame” (p. 1). Indeed, by the time of her death in 1960, Hurston was living in the South in public obscurity and dire financial straits.

There are elements beyond strictly disciplinary conservatism that account for Hurston’s recovery in literature and sidelining in anthropology. Freeman Marshall explicates these dual chronologies and highlights the interplay of forces that elevated Hurston on the literary track and impeded her in the social sciences. It was not simply that Hurston had the fortune of an Alice Walker to prompt a literary resurgence in the 1970s, and that no similar booster of influence stepped up in anthropology. Rather, it is a story beyond that familiar narrative of heroic rediscovery. Freeman Marshall shows that, over time, a multitude of individuals and a constellation of double standards within and outside academia kept Hurston’s scholarship from a fair reading. Social ideologies of race, gender, and class, academic politics, and cultural currents of fashion, favor, and disfavor were and are key.

Freeman Marshall’s purview is expansive, ranging from literary history to African American studies to feminist scholarship to folklore and anthropology, but her method is detailed. Each chapter offers close readings of texts and, in some instances, images too. Freeman Marshall is fine-tuned to historiography, but she factors in popular discourse and reception as well. Specialists will find this work of intellectual history incisive and comprehensive; no comparable study assembles such a rigorous inventory of writings about and by Hurston. For generalists, the book will perhaps read as dense, but it should not be overlooked. In its broader import, Ain’t I an Anthropologist resonates with contemporary reassessments in so many spheres of arts, letters, and learning. [End Page 646] There were many consigned to the margins (women, people of color, independent scholars, activists) who saw past the conventions of their age, even if they were hardly...