Zora Neale Hurston, Biographical Criticism, and African Diasporic Vernacular Culture

A combination of narrative, ethnographic, epistolary, critical, and biographical discourses has produced Hurston as a literary historical figure with whom her audience feels an intimacy as familiar as the vernacular with which she has been so strongly identified. However, an analysis of the numerous institutional entanglements of Hurston's life and career reveals the degree to which the familiar, intimate, vernacular Hurston paradoxically emerges from conditions of textual production she often struggled against as a student, theatrical producer, performer, anthropologist, essayist, letter-writer, and novelist. Her posthumous reception and canonization continue to evade the range of discursive stances she aimed to achieve with regard to questions of African diasporic vernacular culture