• We See with the Skin: On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study) cover image

PRE-ORDER: We See with the Skin: On Zora Neale Hurston's Methodology (Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study)

Regular price
Binding:

Added to your cart!

Roshanak Kheshti opens her book with a line from one of Zora Neale Hurston’s earliest stories: “we see with the skin.” From this brief but potent line, Kheshti examines how Hurston’s understanding of Black skin as both seen and seeing offers radical insight into racialized perception and Black consciousness. Kheshti follows Hurston’s travels across the back woods of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana as a filmmaker and sensory ethnographer of the African diasporic spiritual practice of hoodoo. Through her travels, Hurston encountered a sensibility that could animate the object status of being colored with the power of a return gaze. Kheshti considers both how Hurston poetically exploited the synesthetic logic at the heart of race thinking—being colored—and how her embodied performance ethnography catalogued an outside to that logic. We See with the Skin is an original mapping of Hurston’s synesthetic theory and its broader implications for understanding minoritarian perception and thought.

Author(s)
Roshanak Kheshti PhD
Publication Year
2026
Publication date
August 11, 2026
Pages
236
Binding
Paperback
Language
English
Publisher
Duke University Press
ISBN
9781478038887
Dimensions
6.0 × 2.0 × 9.0 in
Weight
0.98 lb

Check out our shop on bookshop.org to order and still support us ♥

discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •
discover more in this category •

Stay Informed. We're building a community committed to celebrating Black authors + artisans. Subscribe to keep up with all things Kindred Stories.