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Title
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Beyond NOLA: Exploring Zora Neale Hurston in Bogalusa, Louisiana’s Magic City
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Read Online
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Abstract
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Beyond NOLA: Exploring Zora Neale Hurston in Bogalusa, Louisiana’s Magic City examines the influence of an industrial town seventy miles north of New Orleans (NOLA) on Hurston’s research in hoodoo and African American culture. Scholars largely overgeneralize Louisiana in Hurston’s ethnographic fieldwork and literature, associating it solely with New Orleans. Beyond NOLA departs from this praxis and engages her writings and other historical artifacts to uncover the research she performed in Bogalusa at the turn of the twentieth century. Hurston’s field notes and letters to Langston Hughes from this period shed light on how her experiences of traveling alone in the American South and engaging with the people of Bogalusa 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 the city'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.
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Keywords
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African American Studies, Women Studies, Literary Studies, Historical Studies, Cultural Studies
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Author
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Sondra Bickham Washington, Ph.D.
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Bio
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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.
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Platform
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Scalar
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Bibliographic Citation
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Bickham Washington, Sondra. "Beyond NOLA: Exploring Zora Neale Hurston in Bogalusa, Louisiana’s Magic City." Illinois Open Publishing Network, 2025. https://doi.org/10.21900/pww.28
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Review
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“The extent of information provided in each section is immense, and the combination of archival materials, historical maps, photographs, letters, and segments of Hurston’s writing work together to center the city as an important site not just for her research, but also as a location that provided employment opportunities for countless other Black Americans, including laborers, professional class, and entrepreneurs. Through the combination of these elements, Beyond NOLA brings the active Black community of Bogalusa to life….Beyond NOLA is an innovative digital humanities project that creatively expands the scholarship on Hurston.”
Jessina Emmert, University of Kansas
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