Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God turns 75 next week and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African American and African Studies, in conjunction with the Virginia Festival of the Book, will join in a national celebration of this legendary novel. First published in 1937, Their Eyes was written during a seven-week period when Hurston was conducting anthropological research in Haiti. Please join faculty and students from the University of Virginia—and bluesman, Victor Cabas--for a wide-ranging discussion of the novel and its impact on American literary and cultural history. Topics include but are not limited to Hurston as anthropologist, her interpretation of vernacular culture, language and dialect, the politics of gender and sexuality, food ways, folklore, black community formation, blues music, the history and legacy of slavery, labor and migration, and the politics of natural disasters.


Professor Lisa Woolfork--Department of English
Professor Gertrude Fraser--Vice Provost for Faulty Recruitment and Retention
Professor Victor Cabas--Department of Rhetoric, Hampden-Sydney College
Professor Sabrina Pendergrass--Department of Sociology/ African American and African Studies
Kwame Holmes--Carter G. Woodson Institute, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Jason Saunders--Department of English Doctoral Student

Tuesday, September 18, 2012
4:30pm
125 Minor Hall

Light refreshments to follow in Minor Hall Lobby