ABSTRACT
"Characteristics of Negro Expression" is a seminal text of African American criticism in which Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most famous African American writers of the twentieth century. She presents an aesthetic theory of black cultural expression based on her anthropological fieldwork on black communities of the American South. Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891, but moved to Eatonville, Florida, while still a toddler. Eatonville was one of the first officially self-governed African American towns in the US. Growing up in a place governed entirely by black people clearly had a profound effect on Hurston, as she returned to Eatonville again and again in her fiction and anthropological work. While in New York, Hurston became interested in anthropology and soon won a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied with the renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. Under Boas's direction, Hurston returned to Eatonville in 1927 on a research trip to collect black folklore.
