When Zora Neale Hurston published her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937, prominent African American critics derided the book for its neglect to address the “race issue.” After the book’s initial release, critic Marian Minus wrote in her review that one “wishes that Miss Hurston had allowed Janie [the main character] and Tea Cake to be less on love for enough paragraphs” to show their reactions to the racism that they faced As a result, many people approach Hurston’s text as a romance novel. However, nearly forty years later, with the rise of black feminist theory led by scholars such as Alice Walker, a new reading was introduced to the text. Black feminist scholars and the 1970s and have heralded Hurston’s novel as protest literature
