“Such a Tangible Thing:” Zora Neale Hurston’s Unruly Stones of Memory

Pasqualina considers what Zora Neale Hurston might say to Americans today not simply about memorializing Robert E. Lee or Thomas Jefferson but of our habit of displacing historical memory into stone. Pasqualina undertakes this experiment as a way to understand a central but underexamined component of Hurston's work and, more broadly, to imagine a more critical and creative--e.g. more dialectical--relation to the US' ongoing negotiation between matter and historical memory. Hurston identified with rocks and stones. In The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison offers a way into a suggestive passage in Hurston's autobiography when Hurston claims "memories within" as a "subsoil" of her own work.