"Sister, Can You Line It Out?": Zora Neale Hurston and the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood

This essay aims to recuperate and examine the work of Zora Neale Hurston's long overlooked sonic performances, and it rehearses several ways in which to read the socio-political aesthetics of Hurston's vocal recordings as archival and ethnographic endeavors. For Hurston, singing not only operates as a mode of embodied cultural documentation, but it also upsets the putative boundaries between scholar and cultural informant, individual and community, folk culture and modernity, and gendered spaces of work and play. Above all else, it encourages readers to listen (again) to Hurston's vocals so as to recognize the centrality of sound as an epistemic tool in her rich, lively, and diverse career as a cultural worker.