Gods of Physical Violence, Stopping at Nothing: Masculinity, Religion, and Art in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston

Abstract

There is nothing so exhilarating as watching well-matched opponents go into action. The entire world likes action…. Hence prize-fighters become millionaires.The first decades of the twentieth century were years of tremendous upheaval in the American experience of both religion and gender. Industrialization and urbanization transformed nineteenth-century understandings of masculinity and femininity, while massive immigration, debates between modernists and fundamentalists, and the diverse entertainments and opportunities of city life began to challenge the cultural preeminence of American Protestantism. Nowhere was this upheaval felt more acutely—as both an opportunity and a cause for anxiety—than among African Americans. The glowing prospect of better-paying work in the industrial North, as well as the chance to escape the most egregious racism of the Jim Crow South, lured hundreds of thousands of African Americans northward, a great tumultuous river flowing toward what seemed to be freedom.