Abstract
This essay analyzes Nambi E. Kelley's stage adaptation of 'Native Son to consider the ways that African American drama is vitalized by and constituted through acts of refiguration. It sharpens particular focus on how Kelley reinvigorates Wright's novel's searing social and racial critiques by actively refiguring the Du Boisian metaphor of double consciousness. In giving new form, meaning, and use to the metaphor, Kelley's Native Son extends the debates about "the problem of the color line" that Du Bois's writing helped engender at the beginning of the twentieth century into the twenty-first and, in so doing, opens critical space to reckon with the persistent and pernicious problem of anti-Black racism.