Ain't I an Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston beyond the Literary Icon.

While Alice Walker is often credited with having "discovered" Hurston, Marshall points out that Black literary critics like Mary Helen Washington, June Jordan, and Ellease Southerland had published essays about Hurston's literary work in the early 1970s. While Hurston is often praised for her "experimental form" and lauded as a progenitor in African American anthropology and Black feminist anthropology, Marshall makes the bold claim that many anthropologists have been reading Hurston's work incorrectly all along. In recent years there seems to be a renewed interest in all things Zora Neale Hurston, with new publications such as I You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays i , edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West ([2]), I Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" i (Hurston, [6]), and I Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick i (Hurston, [7]), as well as the release of the documentary I Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space i (Strain, [11]). [Extracted from the article]