The creative work of Zora Neale Hurston has played an invaluable role in shaping contemporary African American literature. She was a brilliant writer, an anthropologist, and a collector of folklore, a star of the Harlem Renaissance. Her attitude to the racial issue is distinctive and in many ways at odds with the views of her contemporaries. For the first time in Russian literary criticism, the article analyzes the essays of the writer,
in which she touches upon the racial condition in the United States from a socio-political point of view, and raises important questions about the literary perception of a black person. The material presented allows us to determine that an important feature of Zora Hurston’s concept of self-identification of an African American is the category of originality, based on the idea of cultural diffusion by F. Boas. In her essays we find confirmation of the idea of F. Boas that each culture is a unique system of values, whereas race is an artificial category, a construction developed by society. The material of the study was the collection “You Don’t Know Us Negroes’ and Other Essays”, which contains almost all previously published and recently opened essays by the writer, demonstrating her talent and the right to be called the founder of the “black aesthetics”.
For citation:
Morozova I.V. The racial question in Z.N. Hurston’s essays, Ivanovo State University Bulletin, Series: Humanities, 2022, iss. 1, pp. 57—65.