Leigh Anne Duck

Rebirth of a Nation: Hurston in Haiti

Zora Neale Hurstons imperialistic political rhetoric in Tell My Horse seems incongruous with her previous cultural politics, but this work should be considered in relation to developments in Haitian ethnology. Where Hurston had previously believed that cultural populism could energize a democracy, her commitment to folklore was here linked with an authoritarian and racially essentialist political ideology. Hurston responded by severing her cultural analysis from her political assessments, a process apparent also in her later political commentary.

Apartheid, Jim Crow, and Comparative Literature

Though relatively recent in origin—as much ‘‘first-generation’’ scholarship dates from the very early 1980s—comparative historiography concerning South Africa and the United States already comprises a diverse and expanding tradition. Such studies often focus on the south-eastern US, with its extensive experience of slavery and racial segregation; comparison with South African apartheid even provides a focal point for C. Vann Woodward’s venerable The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955). Given the vigor of this historiographic inquiry, the relative paucity of comparative studies on South African and US Southern literature merits notice. Safundi has helped to encourage and disseminate such research, which also appears on occasion in other venues, and testimony to the thematic and contextual resonance between these literatures is sometimes unambivalent: Mbulelo Vizikhungo Mzamane, for example, argues that ‘‘literature from the American South, which springs from the same impulse as South African literature, is better appreciated [in South Africa] than literature from the rest of the United States,’’ eliciting even ‘‘partisan responses.’’ But while numerous monographs and essay collections attest that historians use this comparative framework to think about racial oppression and conflict, literary scholars have, in relative terms, demurred. Certainly, disciplinary foci in South Africa and the US South have tended to discourage such literary comparisons. Mzamane noted in 1991 that South African English departments were not especially interested in US literature, representing as it did a ‘‘hybrid’’ or colonial culture. While South African universities have