Abstract: This dissertation engages the literary and visual texts of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and Julie Dash to produce a regendered analysis of the history of Black subjugation and opposition to it in different places and different kinds of places, including the body, the home, the antebellum plantation, and the diaspora itself. Historically, both African chattel slavery and the Black radical tradition have been understood through normatively gendered discursive imaginaries of masculinity, in which the Black male subject exemplifies both the objectified victim of subjugation and the radical oppositional agent of freedom. In the face of this, I argue that greater attention to processes by which the raced and gendered body of the enslaved and unfree Black female has been constituted as and at the limit of the human, and through which her political subjectivity has been historically foreclosed, enables a reconfigured libratory politics that emphasizes the political potential of the contingent, the contradictory, and the impossible. By directly confronting the history of African chattel slavery and subsequent forms of raced unfreedom, the cultural work of late twentieth-century Black women constitutes a radically different approach to the history of Blackness, and articulates an explicitly Black feminist politics of freedom. Drawing upon the body of recent scholarship on the relationship between cultural production in the Black Americas, political subjectivity, and historical memory, I argue that approaching such texts through the strategic and interdisciplinary use of deconstructive, psychoanalytic, and historically materialist reading methods has the capacity to illuminate productive contradictions, destabilize constraining binaries, and redefine both the terms and the limits by which we understand 'the political.' My secondary objects of analysis incorporate the literary, the visual, and the juridical, and range from political treatises to the syncretic spiritual practices of the African diaspora. Through this juxtaposition of unexpected sources and methods, I seek to expose the contours of a black feminist libratory politic that expands and enriches traditional conceptions of both black radicalism and black feminism.