Péter Gaál-Szabó - Böcker

The book investigates African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural space. More specifically, different aspects of the interplay of space and place are studied in two of her novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Besides representing the peak of her art as a novelist, the novels present fine examples of her philosophy of culture, her conceptions of space, and ways of place construction. The richness and vitality of her novels denote a particular view of culture and an African American way of authentication that enable her to construct a fulfilling cultural universe for the individual, with/despite inbuilt tensions. The cultural space Hurston establishes is embedded in an African American cultural context associated with the South. At the same time her cultural space proves to be diverse, due to inward heterogeneity and external contexts.

The study explores the dynamics of African American religio-cultural projection in the 1950s and 1960s in speeches and sermons of Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King, Jr., as representatives of the Black Church, as well as Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X as representative leaders of the Nation of Islam. In the vortex of a newly emerging cultural pluralism in the period examined, the previous societal positioning of African Americans is relativized and liberated for reconceptualization, offering them both the possibility and the urge to redefine themselves and thus to embrace and communicate radically new cultural identities. In this societal climate new and renewed ways emerge to realize an authentic black self and, simultaneously, to project it toward the African American ingroup and the mainstream American outgroup. An inherently intercultural discourse, projection reveals the nuances of identificatory anchorage as communicated toward both groups.