Race, Class And Identity In Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) And James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963)

Résumé: The following research paper is devoted to the study of race, class division and the quest for identity in Zora Neal Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and James Baldwin’s collection of essays The Fire Next Time (1963). To reach our aim, we will make use of Kimberly Crenshaw’s theory of feminism as developed in her work Demerginalizin the Intersection of Race and Sex: a Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics (1989). By drawing from the above theory some analytical concepts such as race, class struggle and the quest for identity, the research has shown that both authors share the same current concerns of Afro-American traditions and condition in white racist America as they were both influenced by the Harlem Renaissance ideals and it is their common heritage which has drawn them to devote their works to black culture, class struggle and the quest for identity. Thus, as a whole, the Works contains the introduction where we present the issues that surround the two mentioned Works relaying on the theory of Kimberly Crenshaw’s, we outline our research into results three chapters. The first one is devoted to the study of race, while the second deals with the class division and social conflicts between whites and black. The last chapter studies how Baldwin and Hurston present their main characters’ quest for a distinctive self-identity; we end up with conclusion summarizing the whole research

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