Ash Stephens- 02/12/14, Women of Color Methodologies

       The article “Storytelling and the Black Feminist Tradition” from Native Voices really helped to situate some of the works of famous Black feminist writer Zora Neale Hurston. This article discussed some of the backlash Hurston received for her work, There Eyes Were Watching God, but also helped to explain why this work translates so well as a life history text. 

In this article, Maria Cotera explained that the fictional, conversation-style that Hurston used in her work allowed for the actors’ lives to show nuances in the experiences of Black women in the south in the 1930s. The relationship to folk tales and storytelling was very apparent in Hurston’s work. Thinking about life histories in relation to my own research on prison tourism and museums, I began to think about Hurtson’s text as a living history of specific Black southern women’s experiences in the United States. I am reminded of this connection to slavery and indentured servitude, as well as the violence that continues to replicate itself in American society, specifically by the State. As a note, I think that the title of this chapter, De nigger woman is de mule uh de world, was appropriate in articulating why both storytelling and Black feminist thought is are essential to feminist literature. Works like this from Hurston help us to understand the lives of Black women, and why Hurston uses the expression, de mule uh de world. 

Prisons in the United States have a living history that is connected to the land, and the people who currently and previously inhabited the area. When we look at prisons in this way, we are able to, “reveal the particularities of heteropatriarchal, racist, and classist relations of rule” (Cotera, 178). This also comes up in the Andrea Smith article when discussing the prison industrial complex. Smith’s discussion about organizing and the emergence of racial hierarchies that influence the racist logic that fuels mass incarceration, all contribute to the tension involved with women of color organizing. I am trying to think about Smith’s “Three Pillars of White Supremacy” and their relation to the criminal legal system.