Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Pattison, Dale

doi:10.1093/melus/mlt050

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…In both content and location, enslaved Africans took great care to protect their music from the visual and auditory surveillance of Whites and any others who could use their activities and words to further harm them. One mechanism that facilitated this was the hush harbor (Crawley 2017; Nunley 2004; Pattison 2013), carved at night by the enslaved away from the eyes of slaveowners and overseers. Communities of enslaved people would go into hush harbors, where they reaffirmed their connections to themselves, each other, and the cultures they were creating as they syncretized life before and after the Middle Passage.…”

Section: Sorrow Songs and Quiet Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the evolution from the sorrow songs of the enslaved to their descendants’ gospel, blues, jazz, and soul, the hush harbor can be found within contemporary African American musical forms including neo-soul and hip-hop. Within these sites, African Americans have intraracial conversations and continue to create and deploy resistive strategies against harsh and punitive gazes (Hartman 2011; Kelley 1993; Neal 2003; Nunley 2004; Pattison 2013; Randolph 2016). While the hush harbor, barbershop, church, and other sites where hidden transcripts are communally written might be safe from the White gaze, these are still public (Scott 1990).…”

Section: Sorrow Songs and Quiet Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

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Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music

Allen

Randolph

2019

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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This article analyzes how four Black musical artists make “quiet,” or the inner life of African Americans, legible. Specifically, we consider ways that the quiet found within the lyrics of recent acclaimed albums from two hip-hop artists and two neo-soul artists—Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN (2017) and Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017), Solange’s A Seat at the Table (2016) and Maxwell’s blackSUMMERS’night (2016), respectively—offer subtle, quotidian challenges to oppression, dehumanization, and objectification. We find that quiet occurs as artists describe the use of metaphysical space, or how place is used to make and take space for the self and to find peace, the protection of the interior self, and the gifts of quiet to the struggle for resistance. These lyrics speak to the interior safe space that Blacks seek as refuge from oppression by the dominant culture and demands from within their community. We contend that Blacks exercise power through their dominion over their interior selves, which in turn expresses their humanity. It is their control of the content of inner life, whatever those contents may be, that is an expression of sovereignty.

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Section: Sorrow Songs and Quiet Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Sorrow Songs and Quiet Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music

Allen

Randolph

2019

Sociology of Race and Ethnicity

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Becoming God: Cycles of Rebirth and Resurrection in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Milvert

2016

IUJUR

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This paper reexamines African-American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s presentation of the self in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), generally considered one of the most important African-American novels of the twentieth century. Originally criticized by Hurston’s contemporaries as a retrograde folk portrait of African-American life, Their Eyes presents the oral narrative of Hurston’s protagonist, Janie, a woman surrounded by natural and social cycles. Building on the novel’s allusive title and the convergent Biblical and folkloric frameworks of the work, I trace the evolving concept of “God” throughout the novel as external forces continually shape and reshape Janie’s world for her, questioning whether she can retain any individual agency navigating through these cyclical, predetermined pathways. The redefined vision of the individual that emerges from this reading counters the criticism of Hurston’s contemporaries, as Janie herself assumes the role of “God” at the novel’s conclusion and gains the power to create her own cycles, free from external control. I thus argue that the novel transcends its supposed function as a depiction of the African-American self to make a broader, humanistic claim for the power of the individual, not contingent on social distinctions.

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Migratory Spaces of “Home,” History and Modernity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

An¹

2016

thejournalofenglishlanguageandliterature

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Sites of Resistance: The Subversive Spaces of Their Eyes Were Watching God

Cited by 4 publications

References 24 publications

Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music

Listening for the Interior in Hip-Hop and R&B Music

Becoming God: Cycles of Rebirth and Resurrection in Their Eyes Were Watching God

Migratory Spaces of “Home,” History and Modernity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

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