“Prophetic Remembrance” argues that contemporary African American and Black South African narratives about slavery and apartheid—which I read as narratives of trauma—serve a double purpose in the cultural imagination of the African Diaspora. As sites of memory they call for sustained attention to the trauma of racial oppression. As sites of imagination they invite an ever-expanding vision for restoration. I read this duality as “prophetic remembrance”: a term coined to evoke a commitment to remembering past injustices while engendering hope for future reconciliation. African American neo-slave narratives and Black South African apartheid narratives are literary embodiments of this prophetic remembrance. I consider how authors including Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, John Edgar Wideman, David Bradley, Sindiwe Magona, K. Sello Duiker, and Zakes Mda demonstrate a commitment to retelling the stories of injustice while insisting that a death-dealing past does not preclude a life-giving future. The visionary aspect of this remembering is vital, for it shifts the discussion away from discourses of victimization without excluding questions of accountability. Vital too is the literary nature of the works I examine. Attentive to the limits of any narrative’s ability to speak “the truth” about a traumatic experience, these authors disrupt the sanctioned story of slavery and apartheid all the while calling into question their own narrative interventions. As they bear witness to these traumatic experiences, they wrestle with the nature of narrative itself. Both African American and South African literary studies have addressed these questions of memory, narrative, and trauma, but little comparative work has been done. “Prophetic Remembrance” offers this comparative focus in its reading of these bodies of literature together, examining their often divergent but certainly complementary explorations of what it means to remember and recover from racial oppression. Grounded in an African Diaspora framework, “Prophetic Remembrance” participates in the critical discussions concerning trauma studies and narrative ethics.