Native speakers : Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzalez, and the poetics of culture / Maria Eugenia Cotera.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Cotera, María Eugenia, 1964-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Minority women--United States--Social conditions--20th century.

Minority women.

Feminism--United States--History--20th century.

Feminism.

Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.

Women and literature.

American literature--Women authors--History and criticism.

American literature.

Imaginary conversations.

Deloria, Ella Cara.

Hurston, Zora Neale--Criticism and interpretation.

Hurston, Zora Neale.

Mireles, Jovita González, 1904-1983--Criticism and interpretation.

Mireles, Jovita González.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (301 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2008.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction : writing in the margins of the twentieth century

Ethnographic meaning making and the politics of difference

Standing on the middle ground : Ella Deloria's decolonizing methodology

"Lyin' up a nation" : Zora Neale Hurston and the literary uses of the folk

A romance of the border : J. Frank Dobie, Jovita Gonzalez, and the study of the folk in Texas

Re-writing culture : storytelling and the decolonial imagination

"All my relatives are noble" : recovering the feminine on Waterlily

"De nigger woman is de mule uh de world" : storytelling and the black feminist tradition

Feminism on the border : Caballero and the poetics of collaboration

Epilogue: "What's love got to do with it?" : toward a passionate praxis.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [259]-273) and index.

ISBN:

0-292-79384-7

OCLC:

637319687