‘Think[ing] in Hieroglyphics’: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cross-Cultural Aesthetic

In her important essay ‘Characteristics of Negro Expression’, written for inclusion in Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology of 1934, Hurston outlines distinctive features of African American expression – ‘asymmetry’ (834), ‘[t]he will to adorn’ (831), ‘angularity’ (834) and the ‘art’ of ‘[m]imicry’ – to develop her own conflicted version of the Harlem Renaissance collage aesthetic (1995b, 838). Hurston’s examination of cross-cultural impulses at play in African American culture directs us towards paradoxes that lie at the crux of her work, paradoxes that have provoked an extraordinary array of critical responses.