Meditation and Artistry in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Meditative art as practiced by Morrison and Hurston is constructed to unify reader and text, even if there is an irreconcilable ideological variance between the two. Morrison and Hurston's implicit and explicit criticisms in both nonfiction and fiction of didactic political art are at least partially driven by the long-term social benefit of meditative art about the African-American experience: other Americans can understand that experience on an imaginative (if not a literal) way. Morrison and Hurston are committing political acts in telling the stories examined in this essay, but they do so in the most apolitical way possible.