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3.5 

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive

By Zora Neale Hurston & Alice Walker &
I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive by Zora Neale Hurston & Alice Walker &  digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The foundational, classic anthology that revived interest in the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God—"one of the greatest writers of our time"—and made her work widely available for a new generation of readers (Toni Morrison).

During her lifetime, Zora Neale Hurston was praised for her writing but condemned for her independence and audacity. Her work fell into obscurity until the 1970s, when Alice Walker rediscovered Hurston's unmarked grave and anthologized her writing in this groundbreaking collection for the Feminist Press. 

I Love Myself When I Am Laughing... And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive established Hurston as an intellectual leader for future generations of black writers. A testament to the power and breadth of Hurston's oeuvre, this edition—newly reissued for the Feminist Press's fiftieth anniversary—features a new preface by Walker.

"Through Hurston, the soul of the black South gained one of its most articulate interpreters." —The New York Times

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3 Reviews

3.5
“I've been reading bits and pieces of “I Love Myself When I Am Laughing . . . And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive” throughout the summer. This is a reissue of a reader on Zora Neale Hurston’s life and work. It is a labor of love by Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington and an example of exceptional critical writing and scholarship. It would be hard to open this work and not be stung while glancing through it. Consider just the title of the dedication, “On Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design: A Tradition by Now.” Alice Walker crafted that title in 2020. Each page is engaging. Just the introduction explores incredibly complex concepts like how a preoccupation can become a restriction and addresses the existence of any person’s inherent contradictions. A healthy person might read this book and be provoked to reflection and empathy. It is beyond my ability to say more than this book is something worth reading. Anyway, I see messages every day on how to teach about reparations or a racial justice reading list for the summer targeted to lawyers or public defenders or teachers. I imagine the idea is to prevent someone from saying something stupid or lift the burden of explaining this stuff off of PoC. Viewpoints on this approach probably vary as much as they do about Robin Diangelo’s masterclass. It does strike me as a way of curating the “it” texts and sometimes accidental censorship by lack of inclusion. This is easy to fix. The sort of censorship that concerns me more is the censorship of “critical” approaches to ideas by banning specific concepts. How the term critical became a pejorative label escapes me. The intent to exclude ideas and limit thoughtful and informed discussion seems clear. Which leads me to my point on why texts like “I Love Myself Even When I Am Laughing . . .” are often important. It doesn’t take a genius to observe that the complexities of society and experiences are so intense that it may be dangerous and self-defeating to not have responsible, experienced based introductions to ideas. Of course, this will now be difficult to do in several states for fear of being perceived as endorsing or spending too much time on a critical theory listed as a divisive concept. The "critical" component is the refined and well thought out examination of an issue. For an example, even the debate over the conflicting views (and prejudices) on Hurston’s work is fascinating. I suppose that is why we have education and scholarship. Where an argument is flawed, like people, it can be refined and adapted through critical thinking. It’s someone's role, in the area that they should, to be a responsible guide. For Hurston’s writing, I would be clueless as far as understanding and entirely miss the depth of almost every idea without this text. Hurston's tragedy, from what I have read, was that she often worked under the constraints of severe thought regulation and was not perceived in her time as having "philosophically viable concepts."”
“Four stars because of the slog that is Dust Tracks on a Road. Otherwise...I could read her folklore forever, it's amazing writing and the subject matter is *still* understudied.”

About Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) was a writer and anthropologist originally from the South, who became a prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston is the author of the classic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as countless other volumes of fiction, poetry, and scholarly nonfiction. Her nonfiction book Barracoon, about the transatlantic slave trade, was published posthumously in 2018.

Alice Walker is a poet, writer, and activist. She is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple, and author of multiple novels, short stories, children’s books, essays, and poetry collections, including 2018’s Taking the Arrow Out of the Heart. Walker’s works have been translated into more than two dozen languages worldwide.

Mary Helen Washington is Distinguished University Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Washington specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African American literature. She has edited several influential collections, including Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by and About Black Women and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960.

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