Liminality and Longing in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” and Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

Abstract

In Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (2018) and At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), Zora Neale Hurston and Dionne Brand, two prominent African diasporic writers, pen narratives in which they centralize the challenges ingrained in the in-between spaces black people occupy at the nexus of slavery and freedom. Through Hurston’s non-fiction narrative and Brand’s fictional narrative, they offer us important stories in which two African-descended men, Kossola and Kamena, bravely inhabit that nexus and willfully forge a space in which they assert and pursue their versions of freedom and fulfillment despite the tragedies and longing that haunt them. In Barracoon and At the Full and Change of the Moon, both authors document how persistent freedom quests and insistence on retaining and passing remembrances serve as forms of resistance to consumption by this liminal space. In both texts, then, Hurston and Brand provide us with important African diasporic narratives about the continuity of survival, resilience, and empowerment in the face of tremendous adversity.