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In the phantasmagoric performance that begins the second act of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Beneatha Younger emerges with a short “close-cropped” natural style after cutting off her straightened hair offstage. Although this is a seemingly minor theatrical moment, hair in this scene and Hansberry’s work and life serves as a powerful dramatic signifier, a political tool for self-understanding and liberation, and a cultural bridge between African and African diasporic identity. Drawing from archival material concerning the original 1957 playscript, Tracy Heather Strain’s 2017 documentary Sighted Eyes/Feeling Hands, and recent scholarship, this article examines how Beneatha asserts her own body politics and corporeal scripting in her interactions with two romantic prospects, Joseph Asagai and George Murchison, to argue that her relationship with each suitor represents the complicated ways she wrestles with the meaning of the African diaspora. By embracing her natural hair and making deliberate aesthetic self-fashioning choices, Beneatha reclaims an ancestral African identity and cultivates a global Black consciousness that ultimately exceeds specific performances of dress, dance, and hair.

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I explore the relationship between Hurston as ethnographer and Kossola as subject in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,” posthumously published in 2018 but extant since 1931. Barracoon reveals how Hurston wrestles with her dual identity as fiction writer and cultural anthropologist as it crafts a narrative of slavery and liberation around conjured memory and the ethnographic relationship. The essay considers how Hurston harnesses her rhetorical powers to convince Kossola to share recollections of his life “in Affica soil,” and examines how the themes of loss and recovery emerge in Hurston’s recording of Kossola’s narrative of capture, enslavement, and free life in Africatown, the construction of an archive of transatlantic slavery, and the extraliterary narrative of Alice Walker’s reclamation of Hurston’s own voice into the canon.

Literary representations of modern racialized slavery in the Americas date back to the era of slavery itself. Formerly enslaved persons, most often with sponsorship from white abolitionists, wrote and published first-person narratives detailing the horrors of life in bondage and their strenuous path to freedom, though the journeys were far from linear. Within the historical antebellum slave narratives, those written in English, and specifically those produced in the United States, have come to represent the genre, though there are examples in multiple languages and geographies across the African diaspora. These first-person testimonies are always a function of memory, modified through editing, and frequently written to garner support for the antislavery audience. As such, the slave narratives operate with established literary conventions that persist across the genre. Although the editing and narrative silences call into question their authentic voice, the writing, publishing, and circulation of the historical slave narratives, which center, to varying degrees, the subjectivities of their Black writers/narrators, marks a foundational moment in African American literary history, and literature of the African diaspora writ large. If the slave narratives of the antebellum and the early postbellum period trouble the distinctions between history and literature, then the neo-slave narratives or contemporary narratives of slavery obliterate generic divisions. Diasporic authors writing fiction, poetry, drama, essays, and more gather from the “scraps” and fragments of slavery’s archive and perform visionary acts of imagination to create a vast and varied landscape of literary representations of slavery in the mid- to late-20th century and into the 21st century. These authors and artists have reconfigured and reimagined the first-person slave narratives and shaped them into stunning cultural products that foreground Black subjectivity, African identity in the diaspora, and the possibilities for freedom.