Their Eyes Were Watching God

Zora Neale Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 during the Great Depression and long after the 1920s height of the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic and cultural movement during which Black artists asserted their right to self-representation. Nevertheless, Hurston’s novel is an important work that both shows the influence of the movement on African American literature, expanding the umbrella of the Harlem Renaissance to cover not only Black lives in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but also the vibrant culture of those in the South.

During the Harlem Renaissance, writers and artists sought to celebrate the beauty, creativity, and originality of African American culture. Writers such as W. E. B. DuBois and Alain Locke saw these artistic contributions as proof that African Americans were full citizens during an age when Jim Crow laws and mob violence prevented the full exercise of their rights. Artists and critics who embraced the political program of the Harlem Renaissance felt pressure to present positive images to white audiences in an effort to transform the image of Black Americans from the rural, uneducated, and stuck in the past stereotype that dominated white imagination. Of particular importance was changing the representation of Black women from either the sexless enslaved “Mammies” or promiscuous “Jezebels” who tempted virtuous white men into sin.