Hard Skies and Bottomless Questions: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Epistemological Opacity in Black Religious Experience
Approaching Zora Neale Hurston as both a littérateur and cultural theorist who challenges conventional methodological and discursive boundaries, this article investigates her famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Drawing on Charles Long's category of opacity as a crucial factor in the dy...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
The Pennsylvania State University Press
[2016]
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| In: |
Journal of Africana religions
Year: 2016, Volume: 4, Issue: 2, Pages: 186-214 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Hurston, Zora Neale 1891-1960, Their eyes were watching God
/ Blacks
/ Religious experience
/ Idea of God
/ Cognition theory
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| RelBib Classification: | AB Philosophy of religion; criticism of religion; atheism AE Psychology of religion AG Religious life; material religion BS Traditional African religions CA Christianity FD Contextual theology KBQ North America NBC Doctrine of God |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Approaching Zora Neale Hurston as both a littérateur and cultural theorist who challenges conventional methodological and discursive boundaries, this article investigates her famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Drawing on Charles Long's category of opacity as a crucial factor in the dynamics of Black religious experience, I contend that the value of Their Eyes Were Watching God extends beyond the domain of literary theory into the domain of religious theory. More specifically, a close reading of certain passages in the novel signals disruptive wonderment and sacred silence as two motifs underscoring the integral status of epistemological opacity in Black religious experience. Further, the way the novel encodes these two motifs suggests the phenomenological receptivity of Black religious experience to spiritually based African and African-derived epistemological repertoires originating outside the Judeo-Christian tradition that construct reality independently. |
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| ISSN: | 2165-5413 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of Africana religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.5325/jafrireli.4.2.0186 |