Examines Zora Neale Hurston's work, particularly her collection of folklore and ethnography of the American South, "Mules and Men." Looks at the author's role, the ways the ethnographer inscribes herself into the text, and speculates about Hurston's understanding of the limits of the impersonal researcher.
"The Spanish expression--la cultura cura (culture heals)--is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people"
Review also covers Whither Thou Goest -- Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country by Carl A. Brasseaux and others; and 'Who Set You Flowin'?' by Farah Jasmine Griffin
Tillis explores the socio-political poetics of Blas Jiménez in the context of the negritude aesthetic in the Spanish-speaking world. The selected poems of Jiménez attest to the continuation of negritude ideology of Afrocentric thematic poetry in the Carribean and showed that the poet's social criticism is linked to an ideology of white supremacy resulting from colonialism and slavery.;
Proposes that civilizational analysis has yet to fully address the colonial legacy and, to clarify the stakes at play, compares and contrasts the historical sociology of CLR James with the mytho-poetics of Derek Walcott. Both authors, in different ways, have attempted to endow that quintessentially un-civilizable body -- the New World slave -- with subjecthood.
