S2, E16 Practicing Zora

Zora's Daughters

In this final episode of the season, you will hear our incredible conversation with Professors Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Kevin Quashie, and Autumn Womack, and vocalist and composer Candice Hoyes from Wednesday, May 4th.

Traditionally, Zora Neale Hurston has been more widely celebrated for her contributions to American literature than as an anthropologist and folklorist. In recent years, we have begun to see more mainstream recognition of her interventions into the discipline of anthropology. This re-membering has been accompanied by a variety of aesthetic invocations, particularly to signal disruption, authenticity, and the avant-garde. In this way, Zora is called into practice and treated as an object of use. We will invite academics and artists to discuss how Zora Neale Hurston inspires their work and the phenomenon of Black women’s use as the “sliding glass door” (James 2015) that opens up into new conditions of possibility. We will reflect upon the instrumentalization of Black women to ask: How can we tend to Black women’s memory and legacy with care?

Thank you for listening to Season 2 of the podcast! We'll be back in September for Season 3. In the meantime, you can keep up with us via Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon over the summer. Love and light, y'all!

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.