![]() ![]() Throughout the essays, she’s critical of those who attempt to co-opt downtrodden African Americans for their own ends Hurston reserves special contempt for Marxists and their Black literary advocates such as Richard Wright, who cast Black life in terms of victimhood, as “units of oppression”. Hurston, on the other hand, was determined to preserve the brilliance of “Black English” in traditional cultural forms, whether embellished by preachers or embedded in folk tales – an approach that the most influential Black critic Alain Locke thought was retrograde and unsophisticated. Writers such as James Weldon Johnson had sought to “tidy up” Black vernacular forms in standard English. ![]() ![]() But, at its height, when Hurston and her contemporaries laid claim to modernism, she also accented the primacy of the African American working-class “voice”, which was disparaged by the Black middle-class. ![]() The essays demonstrate the wit of a pioneering star of the Black literary circle dubbed by Wallace Thurman “the Niggeratti” (a title she endorsed) during the short-lived Harlem Renaissance. ![]()
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