Premieres Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023 at 9 p.m. on KPBS TV + Wednesday, Jan. 18 at 8 p.m. on KPBS 2 / PBS Video app
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents "Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space," a new in-depth biography of the influential author whose groundbreaking anthropological work would challenge assumptions about race, gender and cultural superiority that had long defined the field in the 19th century.
Raised in the small all-Black Florida town of Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston studied at Howard University before arriving in New York in 1925. She would soon become a key figure of the Harlem Renaissance, best remembered for her novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” But even as she gained renown in the Harlem literary circles, Hurston was also discovering anthropology at Barnard College with the renowned Franz Boas.
She would make several trips to the American South and the Caribbean, documenting the lives of rural Black people and collecting their stories. She studied her own people, an unusual practice at the time, and during her lifetime became known as the foremost authority on Black folklore.
Immersing herself in the worlds of her participants, Hurston focused on building trust. She interviewed Cudjo Lewis, one of the last known surviving Africans of the slave ship Clotilda, collected folklore at lumber camps, phosphate mines and turpentine distilleries and studied “hoodoo” in New Orleans. Her techniques paid off, yielding a plethora of material, which Hurston turned into a series of papers, plays and stories. By 1932, she had been published twice in the Journal of American Folk-Lore.
In 1936, with the help of two Guggenheim fellowships, Hurston traveled to Haiti and Jamaica and focused on her literary and scientific work. While in Haiti, she wrote “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” mixing memory, fiction and research. In 1937, the novel was published to acclaim, followed by “Tell My Horse,” her second ethnographic book, in 1938. But royalties from both books were not enough to give Hurston financial security.
Despite her success, the end of Hurston’s life was marked by money woes and a multitude of setbacks. To make ends meet, she published her autobiographical book “Dust Tracks on a Road” in 1942. While the book helped establish her as a literary celebrity, Hurston still struggled financially. She eventually landed in the Black community of Fort Pierce, Florida, where she worked a series of odd jobs.
On Jan. 28, 1960, at the age of 69, Zora Neale Hurston died in near obscurity following a stroke in a nursing home. Although now heralded as a great literary figure, her work in anthropology — and her pivotal role in elevating Black culture and folklore — is only now being fully appreciated.
About the Film Participants:
- Lee D. Baker is a professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University and author of "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" and "Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture."
- María Eugenia Cotera is an associate professor in the Mexican American and Latino Studies Department at the University of Texas and author of "Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture."
- Eve Dunbar is a professor of English at Vassar College and the author of "Black Regions of the Imagination: African American Writers Between the Nation and the World" and co-editor of "African American Literature in Transition: 1930-1940."
- Carla Kaplan is the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and author of "Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters" and "Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance."
- Charles King is a professor of International Affairs and Government at Georgetown University and the author of The New York Times bestselling "Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century."
- Daphne Lamothe is a professor and chair of the Department of Africana Studies at Smith College and author of "Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography."
- Irma McClaurin is an activist bio-cultural anthropologist who studies the social construction of inequality, poet, the editor of "Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics," and founder of the Black Feminist Archive at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
- Tiffany Ruby Patterson is chair of the African American and Diaspora Studies Department at Vanderbilt University and the author of "Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life."
Watch On Your Schedule:
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE “Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space” will stream simultaneously with broadcast on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS app available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast and VIZIO. The film will also be available for streaming with closed captioning in English and Spanish.
Join The Conversation:
AMERICAN EXPERIENCE is on Facebook / Instagam #ZoraNealeHurstonPBS
Credits:
Directed by Tracy Heather Strain, produced by Randall MacLowry. Edited by Mark Dugas and executive produced by Cameo George. American Experience is a production of GBH Boston.
“Zora Neale Hurston has long been considered a literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance, but her anthropological and ethnographic endeavors were equally important and impactful,” says AMERICAN EXPERIENCE executive producer Cameo George. “Her research and writings helped establish the dialects and folklore of African American, Caribbean and African people throughout the American diaspora as components of a rich, distinct culture, anchoring the Black experience in the Americas.”
