'Why We Still Love Zora': Irma McClaurin on PBS Documentary 'Claiming a Space' and Zora Neale Hurst

(a lengthy, fascinating interview)
‘Why We Still Love Zora’: Irma McClaurin on PBS Documentary ‘Claiming a Space’ and Zora Neale Hurston’s Legacy
1/17/2023 by Janell Hobson

PBS’ American Experience premieres its documentary film this week on pioneering writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Directed by Tracy Heather Strain, Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space is the first film to explore Hurston’s life and ethnographic work in great detail.

Irma McClaurin is a Black feminist poet, anthropologist and public scholar at large—and a Hurston expert and enthusiast, who is featured in the documentary. She spoke with Ms. editor Janell Hobson about why Zora is still so relevant to our own times, as well as the importance of this new film—which debuts during Hurston’s birthday month and the day after the official holiday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Zora Neale Hurston: Claiming a Space airs Tuesday, Jan. 17, on PBS stations.

Janell Hobson: You have so many similarities to Zora Neale Hurston, someone you obviously love.

Irma McClaurin: I feel very much connected to her because I come from a literary background first, which is what she did. And then I get into anthropology, and I don’t write as a traditional anthropologist. I’m infusing some of the literary stylistic conventions into my anthropology. Much of my literary stuff has become more ethnographically informed by the research that I’ve done and the data I’ve collected. And I think that’s what Zora was doing too. If you look at her novel Their Eyes Are Watching God, what makes it so powerful are the descriptions of what was happening, the landscape and all of that was really based on ethnographic data. There was in fact a flood that occurred in Florida, and so she’s using data in order to create this landscape.

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Zora Neale Hurston, circa 1930.
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“Zora very much implicitly demonstrates to us how her personal experience of growing up in Eatonville has shaped the anthropology that she chooses to do,” said Irma McClaurin. “Native anthropology is about … using our personal experience and our connection to a community to try and see the data we collect through the community’s eyes, through their lens. And that’s an aspect of anthropology that still today is challenged. We’re told we can’t study ourselves.”
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Zora Neale Hurston at the Federal Writer’s Project booth at New York Times Book Fair in 1937. (New York Public Library)


. . . .
Hobson: What one word would you use to describe Zora?

McClaurin: Conundrum.

I think she was a conundrum. … She didn’t fit the pattern. And I think the fact that this documentary is showing us new ways in which she has influenced people speaks to that. She was a woman before her time.

Editor’s note: Alice Walker’s famous article “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” was published in Ms. magazine in 1975 and helped revive interest in Hurston’s work.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/01/17/zora-neale-hurston/