ABSTRACT
James Agee’s and Zora Neale Hurston's Mules participant reporters offer their own readings of cultural performances and artifacts, and in doing so, they suggest how individual acts of observation and interpretation can have broader ramifications in the ways culture and community are conceived. While the sophisticated audience of modernist literature might view Agee’s use of a journalistic reporter as compromising his relationship with the marketplace and undermining the seriousness of his artistry, an academic audience might similarly view Hurston’s use of a journalistic reporter in Mules and Men as undermining the serious, scholarly value of her work. In Mules and Men, Hurston’s reporter similarly focuses the text through her embodied presence, even as her perils underscore Hurston’s more tenuous authority as a black female anthropologist writing in a discipline dominated by white males and writing for a popular audience that is likely to be mostly white and middle-class as well.
