Blackface Minstrelsy In Zora Neale Hurston’S Seraph On The Suwanee

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SE: Introduction to African American Literature WS 2006/07 Blackface Minstrelsy in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph On The Suwanee Table of Contents 0. Introduction 1. Blackface Minstrelsy – a synopsis 2. Blackfacing in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph On The Suwanee 3. Conclusion Bibliography Primary Sources Secondary Sources 0. Introduction ”Of this ’niggerati’, Zora Neale Hurston was certainly the most amusing [...] In her youth she was always getting scholarships and things from wealthy white people, some of whom simply paid her just to sit around and represent the Negro race for them, she did it in such a racy fashion [...] To many of her white friends, no doubt, she was a perfect ’darkie’, in the nice meaning they five the term – that is a naive, childlike, sweetly humourous, and highly colored Negro.“ - Langston Huges The Big Sea ”The Negro, the world over, is famous as a mimic. But this in no way damages his standing as an original. Mimicry is an art in itself [and] he does it as the mocking-bird does it, for the love of it, and not because he wishes to be like the one imitated.“ - Zora Neale Hurston The Sanctified Church Zora Neale Hurston’s work was harshly criticized by many of her contemporaries, great writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Alain Locke, for attending to a white aesthetic rather than a black one. Wallace Thurman in his Infants of the Spring explicitly points to Hurston’s image as one deliberately designed by a woman who ”knew her white folks“ and who performed her minstrel shows ”tongue in cheek“.[1] The position of an African American writer during the Harlem Renaissance was a dilemma, particularly complicated since the choice
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