A World of Difference Book

Chapter 15 - Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston

Johnson, a white (radical Jewish) woman, begins the chapter questioning her motives and audience in writing about a black woman's work. She identifies her audience as both black and white individuals. "It was as though I was asking Zora Neale Hurston for answers to questions I did not even know I was unable to formulate. I had a lot to learn, then, from Hurston's way of dealing with multiple agendas and heterogenous implied readers" (172).

Johnson's presuppositions include: Hurston lies outside the traditional literary canon.

Historical note: exotic primitive was in vogue in late 20's - but not in early 50's. (177)

Johnson discusses the "unspoken question inevitably asked by whites of the black artist" that Hurston's essay "How it feels to be colored me" responds to (174?), using strategies in literary criticism to approach several selections of Hurston's writings. Hurston sometimes addresses a presumed white audience, sometimes black (177).

In the excerpts quoted, Hurston goes on to describe a loss of identity accompanying a change of location - "I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl" (175) and other thoughts about her race.

There is a stunning excerpt on page 176 about Hurston's experience dancing to jazz music, perhaps I'll type it up sometime...

Can you erase difference by representing it? Hurston responds to this in the essay "What White Publishers Won't Print" (178). She does not answer it explicitly, and instead deconstructs the question (178).

"The revelation to the public of the Negro who is 'just like everybody else' is 'the thing needed to do away with that feeling of difference which inspires fear and which ever expresses itself in dislike.' The thing that prevents the publication of such representations of Negroes is thus said to be the public's indifference to finding out that there is no difference. Difference is a misreading of sameness, but it must be represented in order to be erased. The resistance to finding out the other is the same springs out of the reluctance to admit that the same is the other. If the average man could recognize that the Negro was 'just like him,' he would have to recognize that he was just like the Negro. Difference disliked is identity affirmed (178).

The outside is no guarantee of the nature inside. (178)