Politics of Their Eyes
Hurston rejected the Racial Uplift efforts to present African Americans in a way that would accommodate the cultural standards of the White majority. Yet she also asserted her work as distinct from the work of fellow Harlem Renaissance writers she described as the “sobbing school of Negrohood” that portrayed the lives of black people as constantly miserable, downtrodden and deprived. Instead, Hurston celebrated the rural, southern African-American communities as she found them. In addition, Hurston refused to censor women’s sexuality, writing in beautiful innuendo to embrace the physical dimension to her main character’s romances.
Read more about this topic: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)