The book investigates African American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston’s cultural space. More specifically, different aspects of the interplay of space and place are studied in two of her novels: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934). Besides representing the peak of her art as a novelist, the novels present fine examples of her philosophy of culture, her conceptions of space, and ways of place construction. The richness and vitality of her novels denote a particular view of culture and an African American way of authentication that enable her to construct a fulfilling cultural universe for the individual, with/despite inbuilt tensions. The cultural space Hurston establishes is embedded in an African American cultural context associated with the South. At the same time her cultural space proves to be diverse, due to inward heterogeneity and external contexts.

Péter Gaál-Szabó is an associate lecturer at the Debrecen Reformed Theological University (Hungary), and earned his PhD in the American Studies Program at the University of Debrecen. His main academic interests include the anthropology of space and place, African American literature and culture, as well as intercultural communication.

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