From the Bahamas to a bolero on Bank St: Zora Neale Hurston and historicity

In a 1935 photograph by Prentiss Taylor, the novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston wears a black silk bolero and performs part of a Bahamian ‘Fire Dance’, collected as part of her anthropological fieldwork in the American South and Nassau. This visual essay proposes that Hurston’s fashionable dress (boleros are everywhere in 1935) and the cross-racial, queer modernist milieu of Taylor’s West Village apartment help visualize Hurston’s philosophy of history, specifically folklore as a collective, living history. Fashion more broadly helps shape and visualize historicity : the experience of history and of being in history. Crucially to the theme of this Special Issue, historicity as described here – drawing on theories from philosophy of history and phenomenology of history – is an experience of the self in relation to others. The piece uses extensive visual content to emphasize the role of Hurston’s dressed body in her version of historicity. It suggests we might think of this corporeal philosophy of history as ‘historiobody’, after Hayden White’s ‘historiophoty’. The essay was made using a web-based digital tool for telling multimedia stories that unfold on the reader’s browser, developed by Dr Suzanne Churchill (Davidson) and John-Michael Murphy. The format reflects the essay’s theory of historicity, in which clothes connect individuals to others in time and aspects of the past are remade in the present, creating a shared history in the making.