Performative speech acts, ethnography and fiction

Zora Neale Hurston was the most prominent woman in the Harlem Renaissance. “As an ethnographer and writer, she … is now considered one of the defining authors of the African American literary tradition” (Robinson, 2005, :272). Following the suggestion of Hill (1996), and of Plant (1995), this essay links Hurston's ethnography and fiction with a discussion of performative speech acts. In particular, Hurston's work is linked to a conventionalist/intentionalist debate about how illocutionary speech acts should be interpreted.