African American Review

Abstract:

This paper gives critical attention to a porch conversation about nature and caution in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, identifying the conversation as a tool through which Hurston recasts the traditional anthropological binary of nature and culture. In conversation with Hurston’s literary critics as well as scholars of environmental humanities and multispecies studies, I propose that Hurston employs the porch conversation’s nature-caution epistemology throughout her novel to attain a unified understanding of human and nonhuman.