Kristin Rivero

When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her contribution to Nancy Cunard’s landmark anthology of Black writing in 1934, little did she know how her own personal combination of transparency and opacity—the ways in which, so to speak, she appears “clearly enunciated” “as a subject . . . but slurred as an object”—would shape her then emergent career. Hurston’s comment on how the vernacular can encode intimacy signals this article’s interest in the centrality of mediation to understanding Hurston and her exploration of the racialized subject.