From Power-over to Power-to: Power Relations of Women in Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (original) (raw)
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Beneatha's Struggle for Black Female Identity in Lorraine Hansberry's Play A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry became the first black woman to present a Broadway drama during the Civil Rights Movement 1959 with her A Raisin in the Sun. For the first time in American theatre history it was Lorraine Hansberry, a black female playwright grabbed a great attention. Hansberry was able to genuinely cover a wide range of topics in the play, including the resilience and survival of the black family, their dreams-racism, abortion, manhood and women. By using genuine imagery, she resisted the stereotyped portrayal of blacks that is usual on the American stage. The play deals with socioeconomic conditions of Afro-Americans and their struggle for identity and place in an alienated country. The present paper proposes to analyse the protagonist of the play, Beneatha's dreams of being a doctor and her struggle to determine her identity as a cultured and well educated African woman.
Neohelicon, 2018
The article is written in the light of critical whiteness studies and the critical discourse regarding the political implications of literary works. It deals with Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun, which I position within the context of black American radical theatre. In particular, the article will show how Hansberry's theatrical rhetoric challenges the public dynamics of racial separation and performs an ongoing role in destabilising the assumptions about the legitimacy of the reproduction of colonial differences.
I was Born Black and Female: A Womanist Reading of Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin in the Sun
Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 2011
I was born black and female,' Lorraine Hansberry once said. These two identities dominated her life and writings. Rejecting the limits placed on her race and gender, Hansberry employed her writings to investigate what it meant to be a black woman in post-war America. Throughout history, black women suffer various forms of marginalization, discrimination, and oppression. The same is true of their position in literature. Because of the white monopoly of literary writing and production, black women were underrepresented in the dominant white literary canon. Hence the need to have a distinctive voice of their own. As a literary movement, Womanism tries to give black women that voice. It addresses the triple impact of race, sex, and class on black women. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) deals with a number of womanist issues like black man-black woman relationship, gender roles, images of black woman in the 1950s American society, black matriarchy and abortion. It centers around three black women as they grapple with the difficult circumstances they are facing in a largely white racist society.
International Journal of English Language & Translation Studies. 2(1), 2014
This article examines the complexities in the lives of African-Americans. It discusses the psycho-social challenges they faced in the twentieth century and their relentless efforts to attain, secure and define a sense of dignity to lead their lives. It also discusses the vulnerability of their existence and the sad dilemma in which the blacks were caught. The play has been deliberately selected for investigation as Lorrane Hansberry depicts, very skillfully, not only the gaps and inconsistencies of the two generations, but also the clashes in their aspirations and values. These struggles and clashes are epitomized in Walter and Mama Lena in the play and are discussed, from various perspectives, in the present article. Offering background to both the writer and the play, the article explores how Hansberry juxtaposes these ideas; that is, Mama finding the freedom to be sufficient for her happiness; where as, her children perceiving money as the new path to provide sense of happiness. The rebellion of Beneatha against the African-American value system and her rejection of the ideals of the family as well as the aspirations of younger generation for self- fulfillment, the sufferings of older generations, the pain of racial discrimination and the struggles for gaining the rights and dignity also form the very important topics of discussion in the paper. Keywords: Generation gap, clashes of cultures Afro-Americans’ struggle, racial pride, Lorraine Hansberry's play .
The Domestic Sphere as Counter-Surveillance in Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
Modern Drama, 2020
• abstract: Lorraine Hansberry was placed under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation prior to A Raisin in the Sun's Broadway debut in 1959. Totalling over a thousand pages of memos, reports, and letters of investigative analysis, Hansberry's FBI file reveals that the bureau tracked her play for Communist sympathies but also, and more surprisingly, collected interviews where she insisted that her occupation was not playwright but housewife. This essay returns to A Raisin in the Sun, which has often been seen to uphold conservative gender ideologies of the Cold War era, to explore how Hansberry depicted radical counter surveillance against the state through housewife characters. While historians have discussed how Black domestic workers employed in white homes became politically involved, little has been done to document how Black women countered surveillance to protect their families in their own homes. Drawing from evidence found in Hansberry's archive at the Schomburg Center, this article contextualizes A Raisin in the Sun among her unpublished writings and the play's manuscript drafts to argue that Hansberry deliberately subverted discourses that viewed surveillance as a practice primarily affecting individuals and families within isolated domestic environments. I show that Hansberry turned to drama to portray surveillance as a communal experience, thereby shifting narratives of surveillance from those found within earlier twentieth century fiction depicting lone male protagonists on the run from state oversight to a dramatic oral mode that insists on communal experience through direct communication between performers and audience.
Turkish Online Journal of Qualitative Inquiry, 2021
The current research is discourse analysis of Lorrain Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun (1959): a play written in the background of racial discrimination. "A Raisin in the Sun" is a social satire presenting the theme of socio-psycho oppression and discrimination inflicted on colonized people by the colonizers in Afro American settings of 1960's Chicago. The theme of the play A Raisin in the Sun promotes class distinction among the characters of the play triggering social and psychological oppression among Afro-American Characters of the play. The power relations and segregation due to the capitalist control over 'subaltern' has been analyzed by the researchers through application of Critical Discourse Analysis propounded by Norman Fairclough (1949). The researchers have borrowed theoretical insights from Carl Marx's theory of Marxism; a theory focusing on how power structure and relations are built in society. Through the Critical Discourse Analysis of the collected text samples, the researcher has found that language has been used as a tool for exploitation of the underprivileged people presented in the selected work.
Unhomeliness, Hybridity: A Post-Colonial Reading of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun
Present study aims to investigate Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun based on Homi. K Bhabha’s concepts of Unhomeliness and Hybridity. A Raisin in the Sun portraying the struggling life of an ambitious African-American family, each one having a dream to be followed but not having appropriate grounds for fulfilling them. Having accepted their position in a white society, they try to create a better future for their next generation. Homi. K Bhabha’s premises of Unhomeliness and Hybridity concerns what exactly happens in the identity of these people originating from one country and culture and living in the other. The study primarily focuses on how every characters had been under the influence of his native culture and the culture he or she is living in, and secondly tries to represent how the identity of these African-Americans had been formed and shaped within a foreign culture. This play captures three distinct generation that are the representative of their own age in the society in which racism controls the lives of the colored people. Key Words: Postcolonial, Unhomeliness, Hybridity, Homi K. Bhabha, African-American, Racism
The Generational Question in A Raisin in the Sun: A Critical Analysis
Creative Saplings, 2022
One of the seminal works in the African American body of theatre, Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun accurately represents the experiences of African American life in urban centres of the US when segregation was in its last stages. Its portrayal of the black community's repression is realistic in the themes of limited opportunities and acute poverty. This paper focuses on Hansberry's accurate rendering of black culture and society in the play and how she penetrates the deception and hypocrisy of segregation that eroded the Black community's confidence in American society (and dream). The paper also attempts to answer the generational question that the younger family in the play faces through the prospect of social mobility. It traces the family's social and economic journey and explores the possibilities of future Youngers' escape from ghosts of the past and new harsh realities. The play's conclusion, with Walter declining the offer to sell the new house, was the Youngers' resistance to oppression and inequality. It also initiated a new social struggle as the family sought social mobility to live in the new setting.
Direction of the Play: \u3cem\u3eA Raisin in the Sun\u3c/em\u3e
2006
This project entailed the selection, background research, direction, dialect coaching, choreography, design, and post-production analysis of Salesian High School\u27s production of Lorraine Hansberry\u27s A Raisin in the Sun. Documentation includes research and analysis of the play as a production. The analysis also includes a discussion regarding the directorial vision of this production