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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
472 p, The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants, black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve dramatize the vicissitudes of power.
