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Zora Neale Hurston struggled to achieve a personal voice against prevailing attitudes about race, and in her writing there is a clear connection between voice and self-empowerment that has been explored extensively in Hurston criticism.1 Her voice was constrained in part by the expectation of white readers, including her (in)famously condescending patron Charlotte Osgood Mason, that she would confirm their sense of the black person's naturally primitive essence. The voyeuristic primitivism of whites vied with the competing exhortation of black leaders to their contemporaries to avoid precisely such portrayals of blacks in the primitivistic mode, which they perceived as harmful to their cause of intellectual equality. As a student of anthropology, Hurston was also expected to employ a certain rhetoric of anthropological authority in her ethnographic writing along the lines established by Franz Boas for the professional folklorist. Faced with conflicting versions of how "the Negro" should be presented, Hurston felt acutely her vulnerability to criticism from all sides.
In his influential essay "On Ethnographic Allegory," James Clifford suggests that ethnographic writing is by definition allegorical, allegory being "a practice in which a narrative ... continuously refers to another pattern of ideas or events." A narrative can be said to be allegorical in meaning when an Other story is inscribed alongside the story being told that undermines or competes with its primary intention (Writing Culture 98-99). The Other story told in Hurston's Tell My Horse (1938) is that of the author's struggle against being rendered voiceless, of having her selfaffirming voice silenced. A travel book about Jamaica and Haiti with ethnographic material on voodoo, Tell My Horse is considered an embarrassing text for its author, and book-length studies of Hurston tend to marginalize it or ignore it completely.2 Her biographer Robert Hemenway considers it "Hurston's poorest book, chiefly because of its form" (248). Deborah Gordon describes it as more innovative pastiche than traditional ethnography, as "[simultaneously a travelogue, a piece of journalism and political analysis, a conventional ethnography, part legend and folklore with art criticism and commentary thrown in. . ." (154). The generic instability of Tell My Horse-the refusal to fix material in a coherent recognizable genre-is in fact characteristic of Hurston's narrative style, and for her experimental bent she has been seen as...