Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture

María Eugenia Cotera

Published by University of Texas Press 2008

Native Speakers

Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the Poetics of Culture

María Eugenia Cotera

https://doi.org/10.7560/718685

Overview
Contents

About this book

Gloria Anzaldua Book Prize, National Women's Studies Association, 2009

In the early twentieth century, three women of color helped shape a new world of ethnographic discovery. Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux woman from South Dakota, Zora Neale Hurston, an African American woman from Florida, and Jovita González, a Mexican American woman from the Texas borderlands, achieved renown in the fields of folklore studies, anthropology, and ethnolinguistics during the 1920s and 1930s. While all three collaborated with leading male intellectuals in these disciplines to produce innovative ethnographic accounts of their own communities, they also turned away from ethnographic meaning making at key points in their careers and explored the realm of storytelling through vivid mixed-genre novels centered on the lives of women.

In this book, Cotera offers an intellectual history situated in the "borderlands" between conventional accounts of anthropology, women's history, and African American, Mexican American and Native American intellectual genealogies. At its core is also a meditation on what it means to draw three women—from disparate though nevertheless interconnected histories of marginalization—into conversation with one another. Can such a conversation reveal a shared history that has been erased due to institutional racism, sexism, and simple neglect? Is there a mode of comparative reading that can explore their points of connection even as it remains attentive to their differences? These are the questions at the core of this book, which offers not only a corrective history centered on the lives of women of color intellectuals, but also a methodology for comparative analysis shaped by their visions of the world.

Author / Editor information

María Eugenia Cotera is Assistant Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of People of the Border: The Thesis of Jovita González, and coeditor of Caballero, a novel by Jovita González.

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Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Writing in the Margins of the Twentieth Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
PART 1. Ethnographic Meaning Making and the Politics of Difference
1. Standing on the Middle Ground: Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Methodology Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
2. “Lyin’ Up a Nation”: Zora Neale Hurston and the Literary Uses of the Folk Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
3. A Romance of the Border: J. Frank Dobie, Jovita González, and the Study of the Folk in Texas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
PART 2. Re-Writing Culture: Storytelling and the Decolonial Imagination
4. “All My Relatives Are Noble”: Recovering the Feminine in Waterlily Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
5. “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world”: Storytelling and the Black Feminist Tradition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
6. Feminism on the Border: Caballero and the Poetics of Collaboration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Epilogue. “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: Toward a Passionate Praxis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275

Language: English
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 300

eBook

Published: January 1, 2010
ISBN: 9780292793842