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"It Takes Its Shape from de Shore It Meets": Creative Democracy and the Pragmatic Experience of Love in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
Ist Teil von
Melus, 2018-02, Vol.43 (1), p.159-182
Ort / Verlag
Oxford University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2018
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Oxford Journals 2020 Humanities
Beschreibungen/Notizen
This article introduces a pragmatist reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, focusing on the ways Janie brings to narrative life John Dewey's and W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of creative democracy. For Dewey, democracy is not a system of government but a cultural way of life in which individuals participate in multiple communities, helping cultivate artistic tradition, communication, and cooperation among a diverse array of people. For DuBois, African American communities are specific repositories of creative democracy insofar as they thrive on cultural and artistic practices as well as resistance to the racist stratifications that undergird hegemonic democracy.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie personifies different elements of creative democracy, moving among various African American communities as she searches for a place where her personal ideal of love will mesh with a communal vitality founded on art, folklore, and communication. She discovers such a community in the Florida Everglades, but when Tea Cake contracts rabies, she is drawn into white hegemonic institutions. However, links between her community and the institutions equip her to introduce a pragmatic, experiential understanding of love into a courtroom context, humanizing the legal process. In this way, the novel shows how one African American woman's creative and communal experiences of love can produce a transformative impact on hegemonic social institutions. At the same time, Janie's necessary humanization of the white-dominated legal proceedings only emphasizes their overall failure to deliver justice for African Americans.