The fecundity of folkloric space: Revising hierarchies in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men and Lydia Cabrera's Cuentos negros de Cuba

Abstract

This article looks briefly at differences between oral and literate cultures, discusses the personal positionality and institutional authority of Zora Neale Hurston and Lydia Cabrera vis-à-vis their Afro-New World folk stories, and then focuses on a comparative reading of three tropes present in both Hurston's Mules and Men (1935) and Cabrera's Cuentos negros de Cuba (1936, 1940). In their creation myths, stories of the struggle for gender dominance, and trickster stories, Hurston and Cabrera use the folkloric space outside of the modern geopolitical space of the nation as a place to deconstruct and reconstruct hierarchies, creating the possibility for speaking new identities and new worlds into being, thus denying the paradigms of identity articulated and enforced by official culture. The properties of this folkloric space allow for new identities to be formed, in which the radical othering of the African in the New World is replaced by more inclusive paradigms.