Between Literature and Science: Inscribing Zora Neale Hurstonâ•Žs Mules and Men in the Post-human Condition

Intrigued by the influence of technology on or in literature as well as the ways of which the posthuman body subverts the existing social constructs of race, gender, and culture, this paper appropriates the Foucauldian concept of “technologies of the self” to investigate the narrating “I/eye” in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men. I flesh out how Hurston’s new “cyborg” identity, along with the idea of performativity—particularly in relation to her manipulation of the genre of autoethnography—resists the dominant constructs of race, gender and culture. Through a re-examination of these major moments of transformations of knowledge/power in Hurston’s Mules and Men through the lens of cyborg feminism, my ultimate goal is to offer a new connection between science and literature. When Zora Neale Hurston introduces her 1935 autoethnographical work Mules and Men to her readers, she immediately calls our attention to the gap between the old Zora and the new Zora: When I pitched headforemost into the world I landed in the crib of negroism. From the earliest rocking of my cradle, I had known about the capers Brer Rabbit is apt to cut and what the Squinch Owl says from the house top. But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it. It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of Anthropology to look through at that (Hurston 3). Here Hurston emphasizes the difference between her naïve internalization of the African American folklore cultures in her childhood and her scientific approach to them after her college education. “The spy-glass of Anthropology [looking] through” implies that, far from being a passive transcriber of the Black folklores, Hurston has to recollect the “garment” that she has thrown away in order to see what she used to cover herself. Mules and Men unobtrusively functions as a vehicle of Hurston’s own anthropological theory. When gazing upon those fabrics of “big old lies,” what Hurston sees is no laughing matter—they are of power struggles, wrestling forces, and survival strategies used by her own people in her own times in order to live. A “life” is abbreviated into a “lie.” The narrating Zora, however, is not simply an outsider looking in. What complicates her role in her auto/ethnography is her being an outsider from the inside, attempting to be an insider again. What separates her from other true insiders is the “spy-glass” of many new technologies registered on her body. My primary concern is the influence of technology on or in literature and 1 Lin: Inscribing Hurston’s Mules and Men in the Post-human Condition