Between Gazes
Camelia Elias
Homi Bhabha (1949)
 A leading voice in postcolonial studies.
Highly influenced by Western
poststructuralist theorists, notably Jacques
Derrida, Jacques Lacan and Michel
Foucault.
 In Nation and Narration (1990), he argues
against the tendency to essentialize Third
World countries into a homogenous identity.
Instead, he claims that all sense of
nationhood is narrativized.
 He has made a major contribution to
postcolonial studies by pointing out how
there is always ambivalence at the site of
colonial dominance.
 In his Location of Culture (1994), he uses
concepts such as mimicry, interstice,
hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural
production is always most productive where
it is most ambivalent.
The ambivalence of colonial discourse
 Drawing on a Foucauldian concept of power (decentred,
multiple, all permeating) he points out the problematic
position of the people exerting colonial rule.
 By placing the colonizers within the domain of colonial
discourse too, he breaks down the simple binary
colonizer/colonized and opens a space for a theorization
of ambivalences, contradictions and hidden feelings.
 The complex construction of difference and sameness in
the colonial relationship centrally involves identification
as well as the crisis of identification, a complex,
ambivalent and often contradictory mode of
representation.
“mimicry”
 metaphor for a process of acculturation
and adaptation of imposed cultural
concepts and patterns by the colonized;
 a strategic adaptation by the colonized as
a subtle act of resistance.
 In its contradictions it unfolds the whole
ambivalence of the colonial discourse.
 “The discourse of mimicry is constructed around
an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry
must continually produce its slippage, its excess,
its difference Mimicry is, thus, the sign of a
double articulation; a complex strategy of
reform, regulation, and discipline, which
'appropriates' the Other as it visualizes power.
 Mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate,
however, a difference or recalcitrance which
coheres the dominant strategic function of
colonial power, intensifies surveillance and
poses an immanent threat to both 'normalized'
knowledges and disciplinary powers.“ (122-123).
Zora Neale Hurston (1891/1901?-1960)
 Born in Alabama
 Moved to Eatonville,
Florida at age 3
 5th of 8 children
 Mother died when she
was 11
 she did not get along with
step-mother…left home
at 17 to travel with a
theatre company
beginning career
 Finished high school at Morgan Academy in
Baltimore when she was in her twenties
 Attended Howard University on and off for four
years, working as a manicurist to support herself
 1921: Her first published story appears in
Howard University’s literary magazine
 1925: Another story published in New York
Magazine…wins second place for the story.
 Is encouraged by other writers to move to New
York City…
NYC
 Harlem Renaissance: attended
parties with writers like
Langston Hughes
 Very popular: known for her
hat perched jauntily on her
head and for shocking people
with her rebellious behavior,
like smoking in public!
 received a B.A. in
anthropology from Barnard
College, NYC in 1928
 was the school’s first
 black student!
influences
 Zora’s Hometown - Eatonville, Florida
 First incorporated all-black community in
America
 Father was elected mayor several times
 Eatonville’s folklore and people
significantly influenced her writing.
Back to her roots…
 1927: awarded a fellowship from Columbia
University
 With “spyglass of anthropology” she set off in
her car, “Sassie Susy” on an adventure of
research and rediscovery
 African-American Folklore…inspired by
experiences in Eatonville
 This adventure took her two decades and she
traveled all across Florida, to the islands of the
Caribbean, and the coast of Central America.
Later years
 spent her later years in Florida,
unable to make a living from
her writings, and worked as a
teacher, librarian, and
domestic in order to survive.
 Continued writing three
additional novels which were
rejected for publication
 After suffering a stroke in
1959, she was forced to enter
the St. Lucie County Welfare
Home.
 Died nearly a year later of
hypertensive heart disease
 Buried in an unmarked grave
in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
 Considered to be Hurston’s
most powerful novel
 At the time of publication, it
received mixed reviews.
 Criticized for not being in the
protest tradition, not being
bitter enough, etc.
 Story of Janie Crawford, a
Southern black woman in the
1930s whose journey from a
free-spirited girl to a woman of
independence and substance
has inspired writers and
readers for close to 70 years.
 For nearly thirty years, it was
out of print, until…
critics rediscover Hurston
 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a renowned
African American historian, has been one
among many to ask:
"How could the recipient of two Guggenheims
and the author of four novels, a dozen short
stories, two musicals, two books on black
mythology, dozens of essays, and a prize
winning autobiography virtually 'disappear'
from her readership for three full decades?"
Alice Walker
 Although it was out of print and
difficult to find, in the ’60s and
‘70s, the novel went through
an underground phenomenon.
 Many African-American
studies courses were teaching
the book.
 Alice Walker (The Color
Purple) was teaching the book
and discovered Hurston was
buried in an unmarked grave
with little to no recognition for
her literary achievements.
In Search of Zora Neale Hurston…
Zora Neale Hurston
“A Genius of the South”
1901-1960
Novelist, Folklorist,
Anthropologist
 1973: Walker began her
search for Hurston’s
grave to put a marker on
 1975: Walker publishes
personal essay about this
 experience
 this launches a Hurston
revival and a mass
reprinting of the novel.
 “We are a people. A
people do not throw
their geniuses away.
If they do, it is our
duty as witnesses for
the future to collect
them again for the
sake of our children. If
necessary, bone by
bone.”
 Alice Walker, 1976.
stamp dedication
 February 28, 2003
 “I feel that I have lived. I have had
the joy and pain of strong
relationships. I have made
enemies of which I am not
ashamed. I have been faithless,
and then I have been faithful...I
have loved unselfishly...and have
hated with all the power of my
soul...I have touched the four
corners of the horizon, for from
hard searching it seems to me that
tears and laughter, love and hate,
make up the sum of life.“
 Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
against stereotyping
 Argue all you will or may about injustice, but as long as
the majority cannot conceive of a Negro or a Jew feeling
and reacting inside just as they do, the majority will keep
right on believing that people who do not look like them
cannot possibly feel as they do, and confirm to the
established pattern. It is well known that there must be a
body of waived matter let us say, things accepted and
taken for granted by all in a community before there can
be that commonality of feeling. The usual phrase is
having things in common. Until this is thoroughly
established in respect to Negroes in America, as well as
other minorities, it will remain impossible for the majority
to conceive of a Negro experiencing a deep and abiding
love and not just the passion of sex.
 "What White Publishers Won't Print," 1950
Their Eyes Were Watching God
 watching:
passing and active
caring and controlling
appropriated and appropriating
divine and evil
community reconsidered
 how does the different clothing signify Janie's stages in
her quest for self and identity?
 how does each house represent/reflect a different stage
in Janie's search/quest for her identity?
 how do the images of fertility correspond with Janie's
inward growth and desire?
 how does each person's perception of marriage affect
and compare to Janie's perception of love, marriage, and
self?
 how does each man shape, change, encourage, or stifle
Janie as she searches for her voice/self?
 consider Jeanie’s self assertion in relation to her
dependency on men.
mules and masks
 "Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything
as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's
some place way off in de ocean where de black
man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but
what we see. So de white man throw down de
load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He
pick it up because he have to, but he don't tote
it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger
woman is de mule of de world so fur as Ah can
see." (Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were
Watching God, the novel)
Negro writer vs. universal writer
 "Negroes are supposed to write about the
Race Problem. I was and am thoroughly
sick of the subject. My interest lies in what
makes a man or a woman do such-and-so,
regardless of his color."
 Dust Tracks on a Road