Cultural displacement experienced by blacks across America resulted in the mental constituency of "an imagined community", which suffers from "natal alienation". There is an intense diasporic urge to get back to African roots and to achieve optimum ethnic/cultural identity through persistent resistance to Eurocentric domination. At the same time, there is a desire to eschew localized minority status in the globalized transnational context. The paper locates the American black feminine self as presented by Lorraine Hansberry in A Raisin in the Sun and by Adrienne Kennedy in Funnyhouse of a Negro amid the pulls of contesting cultural orders.

Forced displacement, institutional terrorism and cultural degradation caused by slavery and racial discrimination unified Africans across America and across their cultural differences, and created a condition for, what Benedict Anderson calls `imagined community' (1991), on the one hand, a sense of a unified homeland, and on the other, a diaspora through the cultivation of connections with their ancestral land Africa. It is a state of perpetual and inheritable domination that diaspora African Americans had at birth which is described as "natal alienation" (Cornel West, 1993). White supremacist practices promoted black inferiority and constituted the European background, against which black diaspora struggles for identity, dignity (self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem), and for material resources took place. And the modern black diaspora problematic of invisibility and namelessness can be understood as the condition of relative lack of black power to present themselves and others as complex human beings, and thereby to contest negative, degrading stereotypes—such as black as evil, beast, as noble savage etc. So the fight is for cultural differences, black specificity and particularity traced to the African roots and for a space in the sociocultural map of America. At the same time, there is concern and solidarity expressed for other Africans in other countries.

Locating the Self: A Diasporic Perspective on Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun and Adrienne Kennedys Funnyhouse of a Negro, diaspora, condition, cultural, alienation, domination, displacement, imagined, community, Benedict, Adrienne, constituted, contesting, cultivation, degradation, American, discrimination, ethniccultural, eschew, ancestral, Funnyhouse, expressed, homeland, Hansberry, inferiority, institutional, inheritable, Lorraine, minority, namelessness, particularity