Mules and Men

First edition (publ. Lippincott)

Mules and Men is a 1935 autoethnographical collection of African-American folklore collected and written by anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.[1] The book explores stories she collected in two trips: one in Eatonville and Polk County, Florida, and one in New Orleans.[1][2][3] Hurston's decision to focus her research on Florida came from a desire to record the cross-section of black traditions in the state. In her introduction to Mules and Men, she wrote: "Florida is a place that draws people—white people from all over the world, and Negroes from every Southern state surely and some from the North and West."[4] Hurston documented 70 folktales during the Florida trip, while the New Orleans trip yielded a number of stories about Marie Laveau, voodoo and Hoodoo traditions. Many of the folktales are told in vernacular; recording the dialect and diction of the Black communities Hurston studied.[4]

The book embraces both her own re-immersion in the folklore of her childhood, and a desire to document those traditions as part of the emergent anthropological sciences.[5][6] Subsequently, the book has been described as an important text for the canonization of Hurston in both American and African-American literature, and in developing fields such as ethnography and critical race theory.[2][7][8]

  1. ^ a b "Plot Summaries". Zora Hurston Archive. University of Central Florida Center for Humanities and Digital Research. Retrieved April 5, 2016.
  2. ^ a b Hern, Graciela (1993). "Multiple Mediations in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men" (PDF). Critique of Anthropology. 13 (4).
  3. ^ Brown, Lois (2006). Encyclopedia of the Harlem Literary Renaissance. Facts on File. pp. 262. ISBN 9780816049677.
  4. ^ a b Hurston, Zora Neale (1935). Mules and Men. J.B. Lippincott Company. p. 17.
  5. ^ Lin, Jung-Hsien (2013). "Between Literature and Science: Inscribing Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men in the Post-human Condition". LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University. 3 (1).
  6. ^ Meisenhelder, Susan (1996-01-01). "Conflict and Resistance in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men". The Journal of American Folklore. 109 (433): 267–288. doi:10.2307/541531. JSTOR 541531.
  7. ^ Dorst, John (1987-08-01). "Rereading Mules and Men: Toward the Death of the Ethnographer". Cultural Anthropology. 2 (3): 305–318. doi:10.1525/can.1987.2.3.02a00030. ISSN 1548-1360.
  8. ^ Wall, Cheryl A. (1989-01-01). "Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston's Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment". Black American Literature Forum. 23 (4): 661–680. doi:10.2307/2904095. JSTOR 2904095.