Defining Blackness in How it Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston :: How it Feels to Be Colored Me

Defining Blackness in foothold of Whiteness in How it Feels to Be Colored Me Wald argues that any social critique must work to divest the grandiosity of the dominant discourse of its co-optive power. American rhetoric readily co-opts stories of Black selves through an incorporating language of diversion that obscures the authentic nature of that difference. Writers of slave narratives and, later, Black autobiographers, countered charges of racial inferiority with testimonies to their industry, ingenuity, and Christian virtues, adopting scarcely those terms of the Protestant work ethic through which the culture confirm its domination and thereby mitigated their differences(Andrews, 95 ). Defining blackness in terms of whiteness (reference to the concept of binary opposition in which unmatched term negates the other) submits to the authorization of the dominant discourse and enters into the cultural subjectivity unstated in language. The altemative is equally problematic, ho wever, since the American democratic idealism ensured that any impudence of difference that could not be incorporated into the pervasive national rhetoric was systematically excluded (Wald, 80). Perhaps because of her anthropological training and her doubly marginal post as an Afro-American woman, Hurston invented a strategy that enabled her to speak from the margins. She employed an African-American language, a symbolic system that reconstituted office itself and disrupted the dualism of the dorninant discourse. The Negroes...very words are action words... the suggestiveness of African-American art transforms the watcher into an actor who participates in the movement himself carrying out the suggestions of the performer (Hurston, 49). Blackness becomes experiential rather than essential, a flavour that permeates and suffuses rather than defines(Wald, 87). The vitality of the language blurs oppositional boundaries and whatever the meaning of blackness is, the performer and spectator are mutually involved in a relationship that undermines the representation of blackness as sin against a moral white flat coat (Wald, 87). Hurston draws us into the dynamics ofcoloration by redesignating color as performance. She inverts her bugger off of feeling different in a white environment by setting a white person ...down in our mist, and, again, her color comes(Anthology, 1985). Hurston represents the difference in the context of a jazz performance, in which the orchestra plunges into a tot up ...constricts the thorax and splits the heart... grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, make it, clawing it until it breaks through to a jungle beyond(Anthology, 1985).