The life and work of groundbreaking black anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston is explored in this PBS documentary. [ Zora Neal Hurston: Claiming A Space credits: Dir: Tracey Heather Strain/ Vanessa Williams, Bahni Turpin/ 113 min/ Documentary, Biography/ Individualism/ 2023]
External Reviews
“She’s viewed largely through the lens of her fiction, particularly ‘Eyes,’ the story of a young woman striving for authenticity and independence along with romantic love. But as the new film makes clear, Hurston’s work as an anthropologist was at least as important as her literary output. Traveling alone through the South in a Nash coupe in the ’20s, a gun on her hip, Hurston collected songs, folktales and life stories from Black communities seldom seen or heard. At a time when anthropology was generally viewed as a study of the other, Hurston immersed herself in the lives of her own people…Today she would probably be considered a libertarian.”
–Los Angeles Times
“Does a pitch-perfect job of introducing us to this dynamic woman.”
–Amsterdam News
How to See It
Amazon (Instant Video)
Online Video Search
Links
Official Homepage
IMDB
Book: Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography
“What Hurston wanted, in both life and literature, was for everyone, of every race, for better or worse, to be viewed as an individual first.”
–Zora Neal Hurston’s Inconvenient Individualism
“Academic scholars working on Hurston tend to be baffled by her politics. Again and again in the academic literature on Hurston, one finds some version of the puzzled question ‘Why does she seem so sensibly left-wing on some issues and so horrifically right-wing on others?’ Libertarianism is so far off their radar that they don’t even recognize that that’s the best label for her.”
–Watching God From the Palace of Skulls