© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press If one listens closely one will note too that a word is slurred in one position in the sentence but clearly pronounced in another. This is particularly true of the pronouns. A pronoun as a subject is likely to be clearly enunciated, but slurred as an object. For example: “You better not let me ketch yuh.” [1] —Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” When Zora Neale Hurston commented on the variations of African American dialect for her...

In this article, I explore the intersection of science fiction and modernist anthropology in a period of crucial development for both fields—the 1920s through the 1940s—by examining the ways in which Ray Bradbury’s “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” a central chapter in The Martian Chronicles (1950), engages in debates over culture and form that circulated among modernist anthropologists, artists, and critics. In recent years, scholars have argued that science fiction has a particularly close...

Clues In a 1947 letter to Ernst Boas, the son of anthropologist Franz Boas, the American writer Muriel Rukeyser confesses, “May I tell you how, as it begins to open before me, how much this inquiry into your father’s life is meaning to me? The stories are very beautiful, the clues to further meaning are illuminating. I begin to see the power of the connections. I am very happy to be doing this.” [1] In the same letter she writes that she is pregnant, a “happy” complication to the work. Rukeyser...