"Dancing is dancing no matter who is doing it": Zora Neale Hurston, literacy, and contemporary writing pedagogy.

Zora Neale Hurston, author of novels, short stories, essays, poems, and works of anthropology, knew the concept of "genres" as well as anyone during her time. (1) Hurston, who both mastered and toyed with generic conventions, was interested in a problem that has recently regained the attention of scholars in the field of composition and rhetoric: how a person learns to negotiate between the "private" discourses of his or her own culture and the often alien "standard" language and value system demanded by mainstream society. A little under a century ago, Hurston burst onto the Harlem literary scene with writing that was uniquely ethnocentric and at the same time appealing to both mainstream and minority audiences. Even though she faced a society that narrowly defined its expectations for black expression, Hurston successfully mediated between public and private concerns and, at least for a time, saw her writing applauded, awarded, and praised. Today, students have need for Hurston's skill of "code switching," since they, like Hurston, are finding that they need to able to adapt personal expression to the arena of public discourse without losing the ties to their home cultures and languages. Drawing on the unique challenges facing these students, rhetorical scholars are now questioning the ascendancy of "standard" literacy and have begun talking more about the literate strategies students carry with them from cultures outside the academic space into the writing classroom. In fact, theorists of "discourse analysis" pedagogies in composition have encouraged writers to engage in written communication within a wide range of rhetorical contexts, so that they gain the experience of working with multiple real-world discourses and not only the academic discourse of the education system. (2) By reading Hurston rhetorically--asking questions about the persuasive force of Hurston's aesthetics and their effects on different cultural audiences--we can position Hurston within this larger discussion of how we understand and teach writing. Contemporary writers often struggle to learn mainstream discourse conventions and at the same time remain true to their home discourses-the vital cultural practices and linguistic traditions that are acquired through experiences in language communities. (3) As a rhetor who tries in her texts to communicate successfully to audiences that are not always sympathetic or understanding, Hurston offers a timely solution to this struggle between mainstream and nonmainstream discourses. It is possible, Hurston suggests, to write for the dominant society without abandoning the literate practices of our individual cultures.

Two key issues that reappear in Hurston's texts should be of particular interest to anyone working with students from historically marginalized social groups: namely, Hurston's emphasis on black dialect and her problematizing of "color." Studying dialect--which is as much an issue today as it was in Hurston's time-we begin to realize that Hurston is an excellent source of linguistic strategies useful to non-mainstream students who face a diverse and not-always-friendly audience for their own writing. Hurston helps us examine how an author may communicate successfully to multiple audiences, some of which may not understand or even care about differences in language and cultural values. Closely linked with Hurston's questioning of language is her questioning of access: she analyzes how identity markers like dialect and skin color adversely limit the admission of non-mainstream social groups into the mainstream society. While Hurston frequently portrays black characters as confident, capable, and content, she does not overlook the historical reality of "color" as a stigma that significantly limited (and still limits) the social opportunities and identities available to nonwhite Americans. Assuming a role in the dominant society (even in writing) always involves some kind of masking, as Hurston shows, but Hurston also encourages students of her literature to play with the masks of color and dialect by finding ways to evaluate the identity markers imposed by society. Viewed through a rhetorical hermeneutics, works like Their Eyes Were Watching God, Color Struck, "Spunk," and even the essay, "How It Feels to be Colored Me" may be reassessed as rhetorically sophisticated texts that need to be examined for their persuasive politics as well as for their literary merit. (4) In the following paragraphs, I want to trace the ways in which Hurston herself revalues both "color" and the employment of Southern folk language; ultimately, this rhetorical examination of Hurston's literature will serve a larger goal of suggesting a framework for a composition pedagogy that uses Hurston's literature and essays in order to help non-mainstream student writers.

Folk Language and Folk Culture: Troubled Tropes

The Southern black dialect Hurston's characters intone became an early polemic for the first reviewers of Hurston's texts. Hurston voiced her commitment to represent the language of the Southern black community realistically, but even today she has not been given enough credit for her sophisticated use of this "trope" which provoked heated responses from many of her fellow Harlem writers. As a black author writing in a market dominated by a white readership, Hurston began her career in a difficult rhetorical position: facing extreme censorship, she needed to create a style that would not alienate her writing from white readers (and patrons), but at the same time she could not completely separate herself from the values and traditions of her "home" culture. (5) Trying to maintain "authenticity" in representing black folk language and culture was an effort that became significantly more complicated as Hurston became involved with the white community, accepting financial assistance from a white patron (Charlotte Osgood Mason) and professional advice from a prominent white professor (anthropologist Franz Boas). (6) Hurston was anything but conciliatory to the expectations of her immediate white audience, but it is important to iterate here that she was engaged with the white community and not oblivious to its different standards and values. In fact, as Michael North has shown in The Dialect of Modernism, Hurston and other black writers were caught up in the politics and poetics of the Anglo-American strain of "Modernism" dominating the literary scene at the time whether or not the black artists acknowledged the interconnections. White artists such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Pablo Picasso used black expression and experience as a trope for exoticism and alienation, co-opting black language and black thematics of disenfranchisement and suffering as aesthetic representations of Modernist angst and nostalgia. Michael North writes:

 
  Linguistic imitation and racial masquerade are so important to 
  transatlantic modernism because they allow the writer to play at 
  self-fashioning.... For African-American poets of this generation, 
  however, dialect is a "chain." In the version created by the white 
  minstrel tradition, it is a constant reminder of the literal unfreedom 
  of slavery and of the political and cultural repression that followed 
  emancipation. Both symbol and actuality, it stands for a most intimate 
  invasion whereby the dominant actually attempts to create the thoughts 
  of the subordinate by providing it speech. (North 1994, 11) 

According to North's criteria, Hurston was involving herself in mainstream white discourses from the moment she chose to study and represent the dialect tradition of the southern black community, which her contemporary white audience found quaint and pleasing--in a patronizing sort of way. (7) Although she labored to make her audiences see the constructive and affirming values of black speech, Hurston nonetheless had entered a public arena where the most powerful voices dictated clear expectations of black rhetorical performance.

Early critical responses to Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God reveal black folk language and culture as a "problem" that divided Hurston's audience. Interestingly, the first white reviewers saw Hurston's use of dialect as a strength of her writing, while important black reviewers criticized Hurston for submitting to white stereotypes. Richard Wright, in a 1937 review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, famously critiqued Hurston for her characterization of black folklife and dialect, which he saw as a capitulation to destructive images of black society. When Wright complains that Hurston is trying to appeal to a "white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy" (1993, 17), he highlights Hurston's engagement with the dominant discourse surrounding black language that North exposes in The Dialect of Modernism. Wright's characterization of Hurston as pointing black artistry in the wrong direction echoes more resoundingly in Alain Locke's (1938) review of Their Eyes, in which Locke praises Hurston's humor and "poetic phrase" but then acidly comments that her story makes him long for "the Negro novelist of maturity," which he opposes to the "oversimplification" in Hurston's writing (1993, 18). Both Wright and Locke criticize Hurston for not sharing in their vision for black expression, and, interestingly, oppose themselves to the very criteria that several white critics found exceptional in Hurston's texts. Contemporary white reviewers of Their Eyes seemed not to notice the primitivism in the novel that Locke and Wright feared. In fact, a few weeks before Wright's review was published, Sheila Hibben wrote in the New York Herald that Hurston was "not too much preoccupied with the current fetish of the primitive" and instead expresses "intelligence," touching "the deeper levels of human life" (1993,21). And on the same day in the New York Times, Lucille Tompkins argued that Hurston's black, Southern characters speak to the concerns of all Americans, writing that "really [Their Eyes] is about every one, or least every one who isn't so civilized that he has lost the capacity for glory" (1993, 18).