Zora Neale Hurston debuted onto the American literary scene twice - once in 1934 as a novelist and an ethnographer of African-American life, and later, after her death, when Alice Walker brought her once again to attention as a giant of Africa-American literature, feminist literature, and of the literary world as a whole. In this book Lynda Hill explains how Hurston's career as a dramatist and performing artist relates to her work as a folklorist. Central attention is to the performativity of her writings. Hill conducts a critical archaeology of Hurston's transcribed field notes, audio recordings, correspondence, theatre programs as well as published fiction and anthropological articles, and offers a reading informed by an analysis of racialist discourses and contemporary critical theory.