Beyond NOLA: Exploring Zora Neale Hurston in Bogalusa Louisiana's Magic City

Sondra Bickham Washington

doi:10.21900/pww.28

Beyond NOLA: Exploring Zora Neale Hurston in Bogalusa Louisiana's Magic City

Authors

Sondra Bickham Washington

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/pww.28

Keywords:

African American Studies, Women's Studies, Literary Studies, Historical Studies, Cultural Studies

Synopsis

Forthcoming Title:

Beyond NOLA examines the influence of Bogalusa, an industrial town seventy miles north of New Orleans (NOLA), on Zora Neale Hurston’s research in hoodoo and African American culture. Her field notes and letters to Langston Hughes shed light on how her experiences of traveling alone in the American South and engaging with the people of Bogalusa at the turn of the twentieth century shaped her research and potentially resonated in her later literary production. Leveraging archival, cartographic, and literary research presented in a multimodal digital platform, this project acknowledges Bogalusa’s significance in her life’s work, highlights the residents and racial environment she encountered while traveling to and through the city, and ultimately expands scholarship on Hurston's time spent in Louisiana beyond New Orleans.

Chapters

In the Surrounding County
Hunting Hoodoo and Telling Lies
Perilous Paths and Unknown Dangers
Hurston’s Route to Bogalusa
The Great Doctor Redmond
Cosmic Secrets Abound
Acknowledgements

Author Biography

Sondra Bickham Washington

Dr. Sondra Bickham Washington is assistant professor of American literature at Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University where she specializes in African American literature and crafts innovative courses on Zora Neale Hurston, Black girlhood, Afrofuturism, and podcasting. Currently, she is writing a monograph highlighting historical and contemporary literary representations of Black girls and girlhood, the specific struggles that such characters face based on their intersectionality, and how these depictions impact the real lives of African American female children and adolescents. Her scholarship has been featured in Xavier Review and Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, as well as in a narrative biography of Washington, DC-based educator and religious leader Nannie Helen Burroughs.