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Paper short abstract

This paper revisits Zora Neale Hurston’s multi‑media ethnography and its recent cinematic reassemblies to show how Black joy, autoethnography, and synesthetic media unsettle male‑polarised histories of ethnography and folklore between the late 19th and 20th centuries.

Paper long abstract

This paper revisits Zora Neale Hurston as a crucial, yet still marginalised, figure in the intertwined histories of ethnography and folklore between the early and mid‑20th century. Drawing on an essay titled “Black Joy Through Media: Zora Neale Hurston’s Ethnography,” the paper argues that Hurston’s multi‑media fieldwork—fiction, plays, ethnographic films, song and voice recordings, letters, autobiography—constituted an experimental, sensorial ethnography that exceeded the gendered and racialised constraints of Boasian anthropology. Returning to Eatonville and other Black communities as an autoethnographer rather than a distant “scientific” observer, Hurston crafted what Lindsey Stewart calls Black joy, foregrounding agency, pleasure, and everyday complexity rather than framing Black life primarily through resistance to White supremacy.​

The paper traces how recent documentaries such as Sam Pollard’s Jump at the Sun (2008) and Tracy Strain’s Claiming a Space (2023) reassemble Hurston’s dispersed media into synesthetic narratives that challenge dominant visualist canons of ethnography and folklore. Using work by Laura Marks, David MacDougall, and Faye Ginsburg, the analysis shows how these films activate the haptic, sonic, and affective dimensions of Hurston’s archive, inviting viewers into an embodied experience of Black cultural worlds. In doing so, they also expose the gendered and racial exclusions that structured Hurston’s reception compared with contemporaries like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.​

By foregrounding Hurston’s media practice and its cinematic afterlives, the paper contributes to “beyond polarised histories” by situating a Black woman folklorist–ethnographer as a central theorist of method, whose work invites more entangled, sensorial, and de‑polarised histories of anthropology and folklore.