Through a case study of Zora Neale Hurston’s methods, cultural anthropologist Roshanak Kheshti explored how synesthesia functions as both a methodology and a praxis in Hurston’s work. She looked to Hurston’s vast archive of films, plays, audio recordings, performances (including choreography, drumming, and singing), and essays as early experiments in performance ethnography.
Roshanak Kheshti is the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music (NYU Press, 2015), Switched-on Bach (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), and We See with the Skin: Zora Neale Hurston’s Synesthetic Theory (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2024). Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, Radical History Review, American Quarterly, Current Musicology, Feminist Media Histories, Hypatia, Feminist Studies, GLQ, Theatre Survey, and Sounding Out! She has presented performance works in collaboration with Salar Mameni and Helen Cammock.
Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the “Experimental Ethnographies” series. The series, curated by anthropologist Rebecca Louise Carter, emerges from the Collaborative Humanities seminar “Experimental Ethnography for the Masses” and highlights creative and multi-modal ethnographic approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry.