• DOI:10.1093/MELUS/MLAB003
• Corpus ID: 233522615

“In de Affica Soil”: Slavery, Ethnography, and Recovery in Zora Neale Hurston’sBarracoon: The Story of the “Last Black Cargo”

@article{Kennon2021InDA,
  title={“In de Affica Soil”: Slavery, Ethnography, and Recovery in Zora Neale Hurston’sBarracoon: The Story of the “Last Black Cargo”},
  author={Raquel Kennon},
  journal={Melus: Multi-ethnic Literature of The U.s.},
  year={2021},
  volume={46},
  pages={75-104}
}

• Raquel Kennon
• Published 7 April 2021
• Art, History
• Melus: Multi-ethnic Literature of The U.s.

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.