NEH Hurston Workshop
Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and her Eatonville Roots - Workshop Information
NEH Landmarks of American History and Culture
The deadline for applications to the Zora Neale Hurston workshop has now passed. The Florida Humanities Council has applied for funding to conduct this workshop again during the summer of 2009. If you would like to receive information on the 2009 workshops please e-mail Karen Jackson at kjackson@flahum.org to be added to our mailing list.
 Workshops for Teachers
June 15–21, 2008
June 22–28, 2008
June 29–July 5, 2008
Application Deadline: March 17, 2008
Dear Colleague:
The Florida Humanities Council (FHC) invites educators from across the United States to join distinguished historians, folklorists, architectural historians, and literary scholars for a week-long workshop: Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and her Eatonville Roots. Just ten miles north of Orlando, Eatonville lies in the shadow of the world’s largest theme park. Surrounded by five lakes and acres of orange groves, the oldest incorporated black municipality in the United States is where Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), writer, folklorist, anthropologist, and arguably the most significant collector and interpreter of Southern African-American culture spent her childhood. It was a “pure Negro town…where the only white folks were those who passed through,” Hurston wrote about the town, which provided the folktales, characters, and events that inspired her literary works and folklore expeditions.
Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, Eatonville is a place of great significance on three levels: its history as the oldest incorporated black municipality; its association with Zora Neale Hurston, author of Their Eyes Were Watching God; and the continuity of its traditional culture. The town and its surrounding areas attracted freedmen and their families from as far west as Mississippi and as far north as South Carolina. They came to find work clearing land; planting crops; and building houses, hotels, and the railroad. Hurston’s family was among the town’s earliest citizens, having moved there from Alabama around 1893. Her father, John Hurston, was elected mayor of Eatonville three times and is credited with writing the local laws. According to author Alice Walker, “…everything Zora Neale Hurston wrote came out of her experience of Eatonville.”
Theme
Daily life in Eatonville was recounted in Hurston’s first fieldwork as an anthropologist. Her best known folklore collection, Mules and Men (1935), included black music, games, oral lore, and religious practices reflective of her early life growing up in Eatonville. Hurston’s ethnographic study of her racial heritage influenced several Harlem Renaissance writers, and later such contemporary authors as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.
Eatonville provides a fascinating perspective and vantage point for examining black life and social structures in the South after the Civil War. To paraphrase Hurston, how did these self-governed Negro towns differ from the “black back-side of some white-folks' town"? Is it merely coincidental that this historic town brought forth one of America’s most fascinating and provocative writers, a writer who provides us with a new perspective on race?
This weeklong seminar will bring together a distinguished team of humanities scholars who will provide an interdisciplinary exploration of Hurston’s life and work. They include a literary scholar who has written extensively on Hurston; a folklorist who wrote the application that placed Eatonville on the Historic Register; a Hurston biographer; the director of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress, where most of Hurston’s folklife collection resides; and a colleague of Hurston’s in the WPA. Participants will examine Hurston’s accomplishments within the context of the historical and cultural development of the Eatonville community. They will grapple with compelling questions about how this unique black enclave fueled Hurston’s appreciation of folk culture, inspired her literary works, created her racial identity, and formed her sometimes controversial views on race.
CONTENT, SCHOLARS, and WRITING ASSIGNMENT
Each day of the week-long seminar is designed around a set of questions and readings to be explored and discussed with the lead scholars, Dr. Heather Andrade and Dr. Maurice O’Sullivan, as well as with other noted scholars and writers. Dr. Andrade is Assistant Professor of Literature at Florida International University, Miami. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Rutgers and specializes in African-American Literature, Caribbean Literature, black feminist theory, and narratology. Dr. O’Sullivan is Kenneth Curry Professor of Literature at Rollins College. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from Case Western Reserve University and specializes in Florida literature.
On the first day of the workshop the lead scholar will provide participants with an overview of the week, introduce the curriculum project, and provide the intellectual rationale for activities of the week, paying particular attention to the importance of “place” in history and literature and how “place” can enhance our critical perspectives on literary works. During the course of the seminar week, participants will take a walking tour of Eatonville; travel to Fort Pierce, where Hurston spent her final years and is buried; examine Hurston documents at the Rollins College Archives; “meet” Hurston in a Chautauqua-style one-woman performance; and attend a theatrical presentation featuring the songs and stories that Hurston collected in Central Florida.
Topics for the week-long workshop will include:
Hurston’s Eatonville Roots
Teachers will spend a day in Eatonville, touring such sites as the Hungerford School and Macedonia Baptist Church. Historian Dr. Julian Chambliss will place Eatonville in the context of the American South during the periods of Reconstruction and the New South. Dr. Everett Fly, a national authority on Black Settlements, will lead participants in an investigation of primary documents, historic maps, and photographs he collected during his survey of Eatonville for the Historic Register. Although many of the physical buildings of Hurston’s Eatonville have been lost to encroaching development, the memory of the historical place remains intact through Dr. Fly’s work and the remaining historical sites. Participants will also interact with a panel of longtime Eatonville residents who will discuss how the town’s traditional culture lives on today through a variety of cultural activities and institutions. Phyllis McEwen, independent scholar, Chautauquan, and poet, will portray Hurston, talking about her childhood in Eatonville and telling the stories and singing the songs Hurston collected during her work with the WPA in Florida.
Inspiration for Hurston’s Racial and Gender Identity, Folkloric Research, and Literary Work
Dr. Valerie Boyd, Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia, will discuss her 2004 Hurston biography Wrapped in Rainbows. Dr. Boyd will explore her work as a biographer, excavate and articulate Hurston’s life, and compare the biography to an earlier literary biography written by Robert Hemenway. The Lead Scholar, Boyd, and McEwen will lead small-group discussions of Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, delving into such questions as: How did Hurston use personal experience in her fictional work? How did training as a folklorist inform this novel? Could this work be described as a feminist novel? Why were Richard Wright and other black intellectuals of the day so critical of this novel and its characterizations of black people?
The Harlem Renaissance and the WPA
Dr. O'Sullivan will examine the role Hurston played in the Harlem Renaissance and her relationships with some of the leading lights of that movement. They will explore a variety of issues that arose in Hurston’s life during this period, including her feuds with other black intellectuals of the day, her use of folklore and the black idiom in her novels, and her struggle to integrate her academic research and training and her literary ambitions. Dr. Tina Bucuvalas, Director, Florida Folklife Program at the Bureau of Historic Preservation, or Dr. Peggy Bulger, Director, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress (on alternating weeks), will join Stetson Kennedy, Hurston’s supervisor for the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), to talk about Hurston’s work with the FWP in Florida and the important contributions she made to the efforts to collect and preserve black culture in the “jook joints and turpentine camps” of Florida. Many of these contributions will be examined via the Library of Congress’ “American Memory” website, which contains much of Hurston’s collected work.
Humor and Religion
Dr. John Lowe, Professor of Literature, Louisiana State University, will discuss the role of humor and religion in Hurston’s writing. Concentrating on her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, and some of her early short stories, he will lead participants in an examination of how Hurston wove together humor and religion in her literary work. He will also draw from Their Eyes Were Watching God and Moses, Man of the Mountain to connect Hurston to the broader context of African-American humor and to explore such themes as myths and legends, work songs, spirituals, verbal dueling, the humor of courtship, and comic re-inscriptions of scripture in her writing. Lowe will also lead a discussion based on his forthcoming edited volume, Approaches to Teaching Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and other Works.
Fort Pierce: From Halcyon Days to Obscurity
Participants will spend a day on Florida’s East Coast in Fort Pierce, where Hurston moved in 1957 and lived until her death in 1960. They will walk the Zora Neale Hurston Dust Tracks Heritage Trail, which includes Lincoln Academy (where Hurston taught), her last home, and finally her grave site. Participants will compare Hurston’s early life in Eatonville to her later life in Fort Pierce; explore some of Hurston’s last and unpublished works and the historical and literary reasons she lived her last year in obscurity; and examine the changing racial climate of the time and how Hurston’s viewpoints on race and, especially, Brown v Board of Education, placed her at odds with civil rights leaders of her day.
Additional Activities:
The Lead Scholar will also guide participants through the Hurston papers archived in Special Collections at the Rollins College Library and discuss Hurston’s relationship with Rollins College.
Participants will watch a theatrical presentation based on the stories and songs from Hurston's folklife collections. This theatrical presentation will take place in the Annie Russell Theatre, which serves as the heart of the oldest theater program in Florida. In 1998, the National Parks Service named the theater to the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its architecture and its role in education and the performing arts.
Participants will also tour the Maitland Art Center, where they will view the exhibit Connecting Jules André Smith and Zora Neale Hurston: Maitland and Eatonville as Joining Communities.
Reading and Writing Assignments
Prior to the workshops, participants will receive packets containing the primary text, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston, and an anthology of readings compiled by the lead scholars and suggested by the presenters (including primary works by Hurston). These readings should be completed before participants arrive for the workshop. During the week, participants will create lesson plans or similar curriculum projects that incorporate knowledge gained during the workshop into classroom material for students. Creativity is encouraged, and participants will be encouraged to produce projects that can be used in their own classrooms. Participants may work in small groups of up to three people. Some lesson plans will be posted on the Florida Humanities Council’s website.
In-service Credit
At the completion of each workshop, the Florida Humanities Council will present participants with a certificate of completion certifying them for 35 in-service points. College credit is not available for this workshop.
Logistics
When
Each workshop begins on Sunday afternoon and ends the following Saturday around noon. On the application, please indicate your order of preference regarding weeks that you would like to attend.
Week 1: June 15–21
Week 2: June 22–28
Week 3: June 29–July 5
Where
The workshops will take place on the campus of Rollins College, a liberal arts college situated in Central Florida. The tree-lined campus, with its Spanish Mediterranean-style buildings, is nestled in the quaint community of Winter Park along the shores of Lake Virginia. Founded in 1885, it is the oldest recognized college in Florida and is located only minutes away from Eatonville and Maitland, sites of two daylong field trips. At Rollins, participants will have access to a modern library and up-to-date computer facilities. For more information about the campus, visit their website at http://www.rollins.edu/.
Who
This program is open to public, private, and home-school teachers, and to selected school personnel. (See the application information for more details.) Teachers and administrators from all grade levels and disciplines (e.g., history, social studies, literature, foreign languages, theatre, art, music, science, and mathematics) may apply.
Cost
Each participant will receive a stipend of $500 to help cover the costs of food, lodging, books, and other materials. Single-occupancy dorm rooms with dormitory-style bathrooms are available at Rollins College, our host institution, for $30 a night. Workshop participants will be charged approximately $135 for a campus meal plan for the entire week, plus an occasional meal off-campus. Books and materials will cost up to $50 per person, and a college ID will cost $3. With participants’ consent, FHC will retain these costs – approximately $370 -- directly from the stipend; the remainder will be paid at the workshop. Additional travel funds are available for participant travel on a case-by-case basis and will be paid at the conclusion of the workshop.
I look forward to welcoming you to Winter Park and historic Eatonville. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.
Sincerely,
Ann Simas Schoenacher
Project Director
Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and her Eatonville Roots
Florida Humanities Council
Zora@flahum.org
727-873-2010
This project is funded as part of the We the People initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program and website do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The title of the workshop is used with the permission of the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community.
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