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—as well as 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.

Roshanak Kheshti is Professor of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the author of Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music and Switched-on Bach.

Preface. Thinking with Hurston  vii
Prologue. Black Death / Zora Neale Hurston  xiii
Introduction. Five Disappearing Words  1
1. South: An Itinerary  22
2. Black Speech Acts  43
3. Conjure Woman  66
4. Color: Scenes and Stages  83
5. Silent Shouting: Listening to Hurston's Films  110
Afterword. From Dispossession to Possession  139
Acknowledgments  145
Appendix  149
Notes  169
Bibliography  193
Index