Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances: John Millington Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Transatlantic Gesture

In the preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), James Weldon Johnson argues that “the colored poet in the United States needs to do something like what Synge did for the Irish.” This article considers the theatrical works of Zora Neale Hurston in light of Johnson’s injunction. In their theatres, John Millington Synge and Zora Neale Hurston work to create a breathing archive of Irish and Black American cultures, respectively, using the stage to portray Irish and Black American folk cultures and give spectators the opportunity to see, hear, and experience performative aspects of those traditions. In addition to drafting scripts that attempt to stage Irish and Black American rituals, their emphasis on interpreting the unique rhythms of vernacular spoken traditions and of directly staging collected folk stories offers evidence of this goal. This article focuses on the use of the keen in Riders to the Sea and the use of the cakewalk in Color Struck to highlight how Synge and Hurston locate rituals in their cultural contexts, thereby giving a representation of them that audiences might consider authentic, while also writing against the stereotypes associated with the cultures under discussion.