A Wayward Method: Zora Neale Hurston’s Critical Fabulation

Zora Neale Hurston looked for angularity in everyday life, where some cast her as nothing more than a liar. Despite the criticism, she continued on a path toward what she viewed as a reinvention of reality. Here, I see Zora Neale Hurston as an early arbiter of what Sadiya Hartman famously termed “critical fabulation”—a mutual braiding of critical theory, archival research, and fictional narrative. In the following paper, I discuss some of the adjacencies between Hurston and Hartman, the significance of their commitment to Black studies, and the blurring of ethnography and fiction. Next, I examine critical fabulation in relation to social death, arguing that social death foregrounded a point of departure that Hurston and Hartman share. After that, I situate Hurston anthropologically and ethnographically through a close reading of her pioneering text, Tell My Horse. In doing so, I attempt to further illustrate the relationship between Hurston and critical fabulation by unpacking her attachment to generalization and theorization of the “human-as-animal.” Finally, I reflect on the many legacies of Hurston. Let anthropology burn—but, first, let us learn how Hurston wrote against the prevailing apparatuses of racial domination.