The Mule-Bone
A Harlem Renaissance Folk Comedy of Courtroom Satire, Rivalry, and Ritual in a Black Southern TownBy Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes
Length1h 38m
About this audiobook
The Mule-Bone is a singular dramatic collaboration that transforms African American folk culture into a vibrant comic play. Set in an all-Black Florida community, it stages a seemingly trivial assault with a mule bone as a richly layered contest over justice, religion, language, gender, and communal authority. Its dialogue moves between courtroom satire, sermon, gossip, song, and vernacular comedy, preserving the expressive force of Southern Black oral traditions while exposing the social tensions beneath collective laughter. The trial sequence stands out for its deft fusion of farce and cultural observation. Created by Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, two central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, the play brings together complementary investments in Black vernacular art. Hurston's ethnographic attention to folklore, ritual, and speech converges with Hughes's commitment to making ordinary Black life, humor, and musicality central to modern literature. Their shared adaptation of a folktale places the work within broader debates over racial representation, folk authenticity, and artistic ownership during the twentieth century. Readers will find The Mule-Bone invaluable as both an entertaining play and a revealing cultural document. Its compact dramatic world offers multiple perspectives on law, faith, performance, and community, while its linguistic inventiveness rewards close study. This volume invites readers to consider how folklore becomes literature and how collaborative art can generate enduring dialogue across traditions.
Audiobook details
Rating★★★★ 3.8 (689)
Includes Goodreads, LibraryThing, Amazon
GenreLiterary Classics
Length1 hr 38 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 21, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Annotated)
2A COMEDY OF NEGRO LIFE IN
3CHARACTERS
4:::: CURTAIN::::
5SLOW CURTAIN
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