Foregrounding (Lost) Rituals in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances: John Millington Synge, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Transatlantic Gesture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".