Slow Violence, Sacrifice, and Survival: Environmental Catastrophe as (Eco)Feminist Freedom in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston makes visible ‘slow violence’ and ‘sacrifice zones’ to establish a feminist future for her protagonist, Janie. The novel shows a fictional rendering of the 1928 Okeechobee Hurricane, a storm that Janie survives. In this article, the Author contends that Janie’s survival of the storm – her surmounting of ‘slow violence’ and bypassing of sacrifice in the ‘sacrifice zone’ – emboldens her to overcome patriarchal violence at the novel’s conclusion. Hurston expresses a gendered writer-activism critiquing not only environmental racism, but the intersectional battles of Black women experiencing environmental and patriarchal violence.

Keywords

• African American Studies. Ecocriticism. Ecofeminism. Harlem Renaissance. Intersectionality. Sacrifice zones. Slow violence