Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston and Hurston’s Barracoon : Blues Narrative Form And History Making

Abstract: Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston became widely available in May 2018, nearly ninety years after it was written. The 2018 publication packages the book-length manuscript that Hurston finished in 1931, which is a record of her interviews with Kossula, a man who was captured in West Africa and trafficked on the last ship to advertise itself as carrying enslaved people to the United States. In this article, I explore how the manuscript finished in 1931 and the published version in 2018 both employ what Daniel Barlow calls “blues narrative form,” an aesthetic that not only attracts readers but also encourages their response. In the 1931, manuscript, Hurston employs methods researchers use today to remove barriers and allow marginalized communities to speak, rather than be spoken for, in the archives; the 2018 publication, in turn, provides a platform for Hurston’s work itself to speak against a dominant narrative in today’s literary markets. I seek to use the blues narrative form as a lens to understand how this literary recovery project contributes to the ongoing efforts by researchers, historians, and artists to challenge dominant narratives about history: who does and does not write and record history; who reads and listens to history; and, with an urgency that is contemporaneous to the writing of this article, who does not read or listen to history because of filters, erasures, and prohibitions.