ABSTRACT
Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) and her posthumously published work of nonfiction, Barracoon (2018) can be read as Afrofuturistic prose and, more broadly, Hurston as an Afrofuturistic writer/artist. For Hurston, no other space exists for Black people to thrive other than in their imaginations, other than in the Afrofuture, where she captures the freedom necessary for us to narrate our own stories. Her stories and her characters are not past or present; they are Afrofuturism at work. Selfhood is claimed, and their humanity transcends and disrupts the time and materiality of the present.
