Hurston’s Art of Controversy in Dust Tracks on a Road

Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, has generated controversy since its publication in 1942. Critics either dismiss the work for its alleged celebration of liberal individualism and its denial of race consciousness, or else they argue that the book deconstructs its apparent meanings or is essentially ironic in tone. Countering such polarized reactions, this essay takes seriously Dust Tracks’ overt sentiments by placing them in the context of the abstract humanism that developed at midcentury to understand the particular forms of Hurston’s transracial universalism, based on patterns of likeness and relationality. Moreover, by appreciating the ways this discourse fails—as evidenced in the many textual contradictions and inconsistencies of Dust Tracks—we gain a fuller sense of a process in which universalist ideals bear the marks of Hurston’s personal and historical position as a Black woman in a racist society.