The Chase and Ruins

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"The author recovers an understudied but important period in Zora Neale Hurston's life: her 1947-48 stay in Honduras. Hurston - an anthropologist by training - was officially searching for a "lost" Maya ruin. But the author argues that Hurston was also engaged in a much more personal project: in escaping the Jim Crow south to Central America, she was able to sidestep wearying conversations about race in the United States, while still embracing her privilege (and power) as a citizen of the United States in postwar Central America"--