Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropometrist

Abstract:Zora Neale Hurston's academic scholarship began in physical anthropology, measuring Black bodies and relating their statistical data to racial type. While Hurston's critics have understood her subsequent work in fiction and folklore as fleeing this troubling research, this essay reconsiders her work in anthropometry as well as the narratives of embodiment that she curated in Mules and Men. Employing what Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks theorizes as "a slow composition" (111) of "self as a body," this rereading presents Hurston as an acute critic of eugenic interpretive methods whose writings anticipate the racism built into contemporary facial recognition algorithms.