Zora Neale Hurston’s Scrapbook

Abstract Zora Neale Hurston is increasingly remembered for her collecting, despite the fragmented picture offered by surviving materials in archives. This essay examines Hurston’s savvy interventions in the infrastructural processes of archives. Rather than stopping at the creation of documentation alone, Hurston was keenly attuned to mechanisms of saving and keeping, and she actively placed and planted evidence accordingly. Her active engagement in her own archiving might help us revise the stories of discovery and rescue that frequently attend Hurston’s appearances in archives. A closer examination reveals that Hurston was both frustrated by and drawn in to archival structures, including national collecting projects now held at the Library of Congress, such as her collaborations with Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle sponsored by the Archive of American Folksong, and with the Florida Writers Project arm of the Works Progress Administration. Materials created by Hurston survive in the records of these projects, as well as the papers of distinguished individuals with whom Hurston was friendly, offering Hurston her own path to prominence, though via circuitous paths, in the collections of the nation’s library. Despite structural power imbalances, Hurston was able to leave her side of the story, even issuing bccs to the archive.