![]() Zora Neal Hurston's work tends toward imagining Afro-Christian culture as a failure and often posits that failure in images of failed masculinity. While cosmopolitan authors like Du Bois sometimes created images of black manhood that stood in continuity with but were not contained by the institutional power of the black preacher, writers of the Harlem Renaissance often pictured the preacher of the old south as corrupt images of failed masculinity, embodiments of an "Old Negro" culture that had to be transcended to realize "New Negro" possibilities. It was a period when, in Du Bois's words, African American men felt their best chance to attain "self-conscious manhood." In fact, definitions and ideals of manhood were thrown into flux, and a newly developing secular intelligentsia found itself in an uneasy and sometimes competitive relationship with older models of black masculinity associated with the black preacher. The migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north provoked massive changes in almost every aspect of African American life. ![]() This convergence participates in a much larger confluence of these three discourses during the Harlem Renaissance. This essay examines the ways in which discourses concerning masculinity, religion, and aesthetics converge in the work of Zora Neal Hurston.
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