thesis

Identity Critics in Lorraine Hansberry’s       A Raisin in the Sun

Chapter I

INTRODUCTION

         Africa and its population have played a fundamental role in the construction of contemporary Western society. The slave trade was responsible for entangling the triangle: Africa, Europe and the America, and its people, from slavery up to modern days. On the one hand, the European legacy cannot be denied in either the Americas or Africa in view of its imposing politics during colonialism and neocolonialism. On the other, Africa has also influenced Western society, for its heritage can be seen in culture, cuisine, religious beliefs, people's physical traits, among other aspects. In English speaking America, African heritage has also served as a way to distinguish those who descend from former slaves, and their culture, from mainstream white society, as exemplified by the Jim Crow politics of the “one-drop” rule.

       The construction of African-American identity is a special object of study, since black2 people face challenges that are not common to white Americans. The African- American man specially faces the construction of his manhood, which, more than his own masculinity, also includes a variety of concepts such as construction of his self image, his social positioning, his achievements during adulthood, and his maturity as a man. The study in this area enhances the understanding of the African-American man in relation to American society as a whole, as well as in relation to their own African- American neighborhoods and households.

        Rooted deep inside American society, the model of hegemonic masculinity is

often seen as true manhood. Hegemony is the power that pressures society to affirm acertain imposed model (Bob Connell 61; McLeod 221-22). By presuming that there is just one type of masculinity, though, it is assumed “that American culture is universally lived and understood the same by all American inhabitants” (Jackson II 738), taking for granted several aspects involved in cultural construction including: social behavior, habits and institutions, religion, class, sexuality, and especially important here, race and ethnicity. Taking into account that African Americans have come from a distinct social context and have undergone different historical experiences in relation to an European centered

society, African-American men experience a different formation of their

surrounding social structure and, consequently, of themselves, including their manhood.

         To understand the situation of the African-American individual within American society, and for that matter, of African-American art and literature, the elucidations of some concepts dealing with diasporas are necessary. Relying on its unique role in American society, a mix of mainstream white American assumptions and African traditions, African-American identity is a hybrid construct that is reflected in literature. Identity, understood in view of Stuart Hall's “Who Needs Identity?,” is centered in the opposition between power and exclusion. One only builds his/her identity by differing from the Other (4). Accordingly, the construction of identity given within the dual struggle between oppressors and oppressed happens toward “a vision of the world divided between the white man and the Other” (Boehmer 235). The Other, namely, the one who is oppressed, tries to cope with the standards imposed by the oppressor as a model to be followed. Consequently, middle-class white (European ancestry) heterosexual male is the model; identity is mainly constructed when subjects embody characteristics opposing the ones considered standard, taken for granted as

characterizing “human being's” features. It is from this standpoint that African Americans look for their identity, especially as a consequence of the slavery institution and racial segregation period, in which racial culture was highly emphasized.

        Although African slaves did not come to the United States from the same

religious/ethnic group, making it impossible to classify them as a unified group sharing the same cultural memory, African American are considered one of the biggest diasporic subjects, together with the Jewish Diaspora, for they have passed on their heritage and culture through generations, thereby keeping alive their own traditions (Chaliand xv).

         Indeed, two major points need to be elucidated regarding this matter. First, most African slaves came from Western Africa; so when an African background in called upon by African Americans, the reference mostly traces back to former Yoruba nations that correspond to contemporary countries such as Ghana and Nigeria (Majors and Billson 57). However, it is worthy noticing that African slaves do not exclusively descend from Yoruba peoples, they do actually also come from other ethnic groups, as for instance the Bantu. Secondly, even though not all slaves shared the same cultural traditions and background when in Africa, once they set foot in the United States they created their own communal cultural environment within plantations to fight and endure white subjugation, and to pass on their legacy to their descendants. This shared past of slavery and historical

heritage are responsible for shaping African Americans as a diasporic group.

Furthermore, when I mention the construction of an African-American identity, I

take into account the fact that the Middle Passage served as a tool to erase African slaves' identities so they could be easily controlled to fulfill the white man's intents toward them.

         The Africa which African-Americans look up to to construct their identity, apart from the traditions they indeed brought with them from different regions of the continent, is actually an Africa of the mind. It is an African created by their own imaginary that black slaves, and modern African-Americans, believe to be their heritage and the place of their “true” ancestors. Therefore, it is difficult to trace a place in Africa where African- Americans belong, for their imaginary Africa exists only from their positioning as African diaspora. The African-American culture, as mentioned above, began with African slaves during slavery as consequence of its social segregation and ordeals, and developed and passed on to build what is African-American culture today. It is from this standpoint that I discuss the construction of the African-American manhood in the plays that compose the corpus of this research.

        As mentioned previously, identity is the result of differing oneself, or a communal identity, from the hegemonic pattern. Thus, it is tendentious to assert that one is African American for not embodying white American characteristics. This is actually controversial to assert in light of the fact that one is neither just African nor just American, but African American, the hybrid of both identities, the “in-between” figure.

         According to Homi Bhabha, the hybrid subject is not a third subject resulting from the encounter of two cultures and identities, but it is in fact the presence of the dominant culture “tainted” by the oppressed one. The hybrid identity is constructed, therefore, as a result of the influence and resistance of an oppressed culture from its hegemonic counterpart (86-9).

         The function of perpetuating cultural knowledge plays an important role in the construction of African Americans' hybrid subject, since this traditional awareness is the African part of their African-American persona. This African part lives side by side with the American share of black identity, indeed affirming one position as not entirely American. It is not only in one's color that identity and difference exist, but in the cultural duality this person stands on (Martins 26). Consequently, being African American is above all being American, but pursuing identity in differentiation, in their own peculiarities.

      The struggle an African American subject lives, I would say, results from the

positioning of oneself “in-between” cultures, similarly to Silviano Santiago

understanding of the Latin American discourse. According to him, the “in-between” discourse happens when the oppressed are able to write and place themselves in a position of submission but at the same time of insurrection and rebellion (26).

       Along similar lines, the concept of signifying, in Henry Gates Jr.'s words, plays the double meaning game in everyday African-American discourse (The Blackness 903).Signifying helps African Americans to cope with reality by creating several layers of meaning within their discourse. Still according to Gates Jr., signifying, being brought from African traditions of storytelling, is based on the idea of tricksters, normally represented by the symbol of a monkey, who, in order to fulfill its desires, tricks the other animals in the jungle (The Blackness 904). The image of the monkey is often a portrait of the mystical being Esu, who is recurrently “translated” in the African American imaginary across the three Americas – especially in the Caribbean, South America, and Louisiana – as the image of “Exu in Brazil, Echu-Elegua in Cuba, Papa Legba in the pantheon of the loa of Vaudou in Haiti, and Papa La Bas in the loa of Hoodoo the United States” (The Blackness 904). This mythological god is the African counterpart of the Greek god Hermes, who connects the world of the gods to the human world. Similarly, Esu, as a connection between worlds and the figure of the trickster, plays with the double-conscientiousness of the African discourse (The Blackness 905). Brought from the Yoruba traditions of storytelling and transplanted to the United States, this discourse, filled with double meanings and with the presence of the character of the trickster, can be seen, nowadays, in African-American street culture, such as the oral games of playing the dozen; musical culture, such as rap; and, previously, especially in plantation oral tradition, such as the spirituals, which were sang in order to mask hidden messages to trick white slave owners (Martins 61; Gates Jr., Figures in Black 236).

     Apart from the African traditional strategies exemplified above which embodied the doubleness of the African-American persona, it is drama that carries mostly the several levels of cognition within the black discourse (Martins 61). Its performance and theatricality are fundamental aspects of black tradition and culture (Martins 53). To this matter, literature has always played a strong role in African-American cultural identity, both as a weapon against oppressive society, and as a tool for raising awareness about the problems within African-American communities. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, in their The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, describe the curious and distinguished origins of African-American literature in relation to the African diaspora and the Western world: In the history of the world's great literatures, few traditions have origins as curious as that created by African slaves and ex-slaves writing in the English language in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. In the stubbornly durable history of human slavery, it was only the black slaves in England and in the United States who created a genre of literature that, at once, testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge to be free and literate, to embrace the European Enlightenment's dream of reason and the American Enlightenment's dream of civil liberty, wedded together glorious in a great republic of letters. (xxxvii)

      Therefore, African-American literature has been special in the sense that it keeps the tradition of African art and denounces the problems mainstream society brings to black people through oppression. However, it also embraces the language of the oppressor, and thus their aims of freedom and literacy. This mix of goals creates the unique characteristics of the African-American Literature, which is distinguished from other literary traditions. Moreover, for African Americans, literature has been used as a means of black affirmation and resistance (Martins 48). It was used to prove to mainstream society their level of reasoning, and create a new stand within literature which voiced their unique concerns, and distinguished them from other Western literatures (Gates Jr., “Introduction” 12).

       Throughout history, African-American literature has always served as criticism to African-American people's problems and reality, and as a mechanism for reflexion regarding these issues (Gates Jr., and McKay 49). Especially in the Civil Rights Movements, during the 1960s, black people urged for a change on how African Americans were treated and seen. Therefore, the literature in this period played a key role in denouncing their major issues (Gates Jr., and McKay 1837).

      Among African-American men's major issues, their construction of manhood has always been a fundamental problem. The duality in the construction of African-American identity can be seen in many of its areas, but most of them are not as complex as masculinity. Black masculinity is not only constructed in view of white American models, but it also respects African distinctiveness. To pursue the analysis of the construction of African-American masculine identity, it is vital to first understand the concept of masculinity and manhood in a universal level. Yet, there is no more viable tool to exemplify and mirror social patterns and behaviors than literature, especially drama; that is why its role is crucial in African-American culture.

      For that matter, drama is a decisive part of Yoruba civilization and culture, from which most African-Americans descend (Majors and Billson 57). Yoruba tradition in drama is the result of religious beliefs and practices interwoven with everyday oral tradition (Reis 200). Therefore, African slaves, with Yoruba background, brought to the United States these traditions and incorporated/hybridized them with European ones, creating what is nowadays African-American drama. Leda M. Martins affirms that black culture is in itself theatrical (51; 53). African Americans have in their essence a signifying strategy that is due to their enslavement and subjugation (53). Moreover, African Americans were also able to appropriate from white traditions and use them in order to mock and confront their oppressors (63). Plays were used to reflect reality and criticize it at the same time, even though a white audience would not understand its critique (65). Through their use of metaphors and double meaning, plays could pass a hidden message to black communities, while also avoiding being censured by the white masses.

      Comprehending black drama is understanding the roots of theatricality in African traditions, and its interrelation constructed through the association of audience and performance, which creates a collective catharsis and reflection, raising awareness of communal problems and issues (65). The connection and interaction between audience and play enlightens both communal problems and identity through mirroring, which allows the black community to understand better their problems and fight back oppression (Martins 86). Moreover, drama is especially crucial for debating black people's problems because it shows more than a portrait of the issues addressed, but also their metapicture, that is, plays “reflect the face of black male identity not so much as it is, but as it is prejudicially seen” (Wallace 21).

        Under the slavery institution and its legacy, black people were often denied any artistic and literary expression in the United States. Although drama is perceived as a traditional part of African culture, it was a recurrently weak genre in African-American culture until the 1960s (Gates Jr., and McKay 960). Up until then, black people were represented by white people wearing black makeup on stage (commonly coal), and therefore often ridiculed and stereotyped (Martins 45; 63).

       Historically, mainstream plays represented black people according to stereotypes – such as Uncle Toms and Mommies, or as violent sexual beasts. It aimed in making comedy of black people to the amusement of the white audiences (Harris xi). Black drama came specially at this point to create a reverse criticism, for its caricatures of black people, painted in black faces, served as a way to counter-criticize the way white society portrayed them (Martins 63). It was only with the performance of the milestone play A Raisin in the Sun that African-American drama took a more prominent political role in American society (Gates Jr., and McKay 1365).

      The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s was a turning point in the representation of black aesthetics; it presented mainstream society with a different view of African- American culture not biased by Euro-centered ideals. Due to the rupturing view of the arts in this decade, several playwrights influenced and changed completely how drama has been written and performed until the present days. Harris presents us with the name of major playwrights during the Civil Rights Movement and their legacy for art and the study of black culture: Informed by black people's quest for freedom throughout their history in America, and specifically by Civil Rights activity of the mid-twentieth century, Hansberry, Childress, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Pearl Cleage, August Wilson, George Wolfe, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others cracked the mirror of history to reveal black folks who were not always grinning the Sambo grin. They explore possibilities for black people to define themselves without assuming the stereotypical portrayals of history, but by transforming that history into meaningful fuel for forward progress. (xi) For representing a special moment of change and revolution in the African- American conscience, I decided to analyze the plays A Raisin in the Sun written by Lorraine Hansberry; Dutchman, by Amiri Baraka; and Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin, in view of the way they deal and represent the black manhood. Also, for the authors' status and role among black activists and playwrights during the 1960s, and their resulting influence in today's African-American art, motivated this choice. Moreover, besides the groundbreaking significance of the plays to African-American literature, each

play is set in a different background which provides this analysis with different locations in the United States of America. Two of the plays are set in the North, A Raisin in the Sun, in Southside Chicago, and Dutchman, in a New York subway; and one of them, Blues for Mister Charlie, is set in a small town in Mississippi, in the South.

       Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was born on May 19, 1930 was an American playwright and writer. Hansberry inspired Nina Simone's song "Black”. She was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant and eventually provoking the Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"After she moved to New York City, Hansberry worked at the Pan-Africans’ newspaper Freedom, where she dealt with intellectuals such as Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. Much of her work during this time concerned the African struggle for liberation and their impact on the world. Hansberry has been identified as a lesbian, and sexual freedom is an important topic in several of her works. She died of cancer at the age of 34.Lorraine Hansberry was the youngest of four children born to Carl Augustus Hansberry, a successful real-estate broker, and Nannies Louise (born Perry) a school teacher. The Hansberry’s were routinely visited by prominent Black intellectuals, including W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Carl Hansberry's brother, William Leo Hansberry, founded the African Civilization section of the history department at University. Lorraine was taught: ‘‘Above all, there were two things which were never to be betrayed: the family and the race. ‘Hansberry graduated from Betsy Ross Elementary in 1944 and from Englewood High School in 1948.She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she immediately became politically active and integrated a dormitory. She was the only girl I knew who could whip together a fresh picket sign with her own hands, at a moment's notice, for any cause or occasion," said classmate. She decided in 1950 to leave Madison and pursue her career as a writer in New York City, where she attended The New School. She moved to Harlem in 1951 and became involved in activist struggles such as the fight against evictions. In 1951, she joined the staff of the black newspaper Freedom, edited by Louis E. Burnham and published by Paul Robeson. At Freedom, she worked with W. E. B. Du Bois, whose office was in the same building, and other Black Pan-Africanists. At the newspaper, she worked as "subscription clerk, receptionist, typist and editorial assistant" in addition to writing news articles and editorials. She worked not only on the US civil rights movement, but also on global struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Hansberry wrote in support of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, criticizing the mainstream press for its biased coverage. Hansberry often clarified these global struggles by explaining them in terms of female participants. She was particularly interested in the situation of Egypt, "the traditional Islamic 'cradle of civilization,' where women had led one of the most important fights anywhere for the equality of their sex."In 1952, Hansberry attended a peace conference in Montevideo, Uruguay, in place of Paul Roberson, who had been denied travel rights by the State Department. On June 20, 1953, she married Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish publisher, songwriter and political activist. Hansberry and Nemiroff moved to Greenwich Village, the setting of The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window. Success of the song "Cindy, Oh Cindy", co-authored by Nemiroff, enabled Hansberry to start writing full-time. Hansberry was a closeted lesbian, a theory supported by her secret writings in letters and personal notebooks. She was an activist for gay rights and wrote about feminism and homophobia, joining the Daughters of Billets and contributing two letters to their magazine, The Ladder, in 1957 under her initials "LHN." She separated from her husband at this time, but they continued to work together.A Raisin in the Sun was written at this time and completed in 1957.Opening on March 11, 1959, Raisin in the Sun becoming the first play written by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. The 29-year-old author became the youngest American playwright and only the fifth woman to receive the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Over the next two years, Raisin was translated into 35 languages and was being performed all over the world. Hansberry wrote two screenplays of Raisin, both of which were rejected as controversial by Columbia Pictures. Commissioned by NBC in 1960 to create a television program about slavery, Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd. This script was called "superb" but also rejected. In 1961, Hansberry was set to replace Vinnette Carroll as the director of the musical Kicks and Co, after its try-out at Chicago's McCormick Place. It was written by Oscar Brown, Jr. and featured an interracial cast including Lonnie Sattin, Nichelle Nichols, Vi Velasco, Al Freeman, Jr., Zabeth Wilde and Burgess Meredith in the title role of  Mr. Kicks. A satire involving miscegenation, the $400,000 production was co-produced by her husband Robert Nemiroff; despite a warm reception in Chicago, the show never made it to Broadway. In 1963, Hansberry participated in a meeting with attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, set up by James Baldwin On March 10, 1964, Hansberry and Nemiroff divorced but continued to work together. While many of her other writings were published in her lifetime says, articles, and the text for the SNCC book The Movement the only other play given a contemporary production was The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window. The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window ran for 101 performances on Broadway and closed the night she died. Hansberry was an atheist. According to historian Fanon Che Wilkins, "Hansberry believed that gaining civil rights in the United States and obtaining independence in colonial Africa were two sides of the same coin that presented similar challenges for Africans on both sides of the Atlantic." In response to the independence of Ghana, led by Kwame Nkrumah, Hansberry wrote: "The promise of the future of Ghana is that of all the colored peoples of the world; it is the promise of freedom." Hansberry said Blacks "must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit-in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps—and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities."In a Town Hall debate on June 15, 1964, Hansberry criticized white liberals who couldn't accept civil disobedience, expressing a need "to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical." At the same time, she said, "some of the first people who have died so far in this struggle have been white men."Hansberry was a critic of existentialism, which she considered too distant from the world's economic and geopolitical realities. Along these lines, she wrote a critical review of Richard Wright's The Outsider and went on to style her final play Les Blancs as a foil to Jean Genet's absurdist Les Nègres. However, Hansberry admired Simone de Beauvoir's Sexing 1959, Hansberry commented that women who are "twice oppressed" may become "twice militant". She held out some hope for male allies of women, writing in an unpublished essay: "If by some miracle women should not ever utter a single protest against their condition there would still exist among men those who could not endure in peace until her liberation had been achieved."Hansberry was appalled by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which took place while she was in high school, and expressed desire for a future in which: "Nobody fights. We get rid of all the little bombs—and the big bombs." She did believe in the right of people to defend themselves with force against their oppressors. Hansberry’s ex-husband, Robert Nemiroff, became the executor for several unfinished manuscripts. He added minor changes to complete the play Les Blancs, which Julius Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her writings into the play To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which was the longest-running Off Broadway play of the 1968–69 season. It appeared in book form the following year under the title To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words. She left behind an unfinished novel and several other plays, including The Drinking Gourd and What Use Are Flowers?, with a range of content, from slavery to a post-apocalyptic future. Raisin, a musical based on A Raisin in the Sun, opened in New York in 1973, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical, with the book by Nemiroff, music by Judd Woldin, and lyrics by Robert Britten. A Raisin in the Sun was revived on Broadway in 2004 and received a Tony Award nomination for Best Revival of a Play. The cast included Sean Combs ("P Ditty") as Walter Lee Younger Jr., Phylicia Rash ad (Tony Award-winner for Best Actress) and Audra McDonald (Tony Award-winner for Best Featured Actress). It was produced for television in 2008 with the same cast, garnering two Awards. The Lorraine Hansberry Theatre of San Francisco, which specializes in original staging’s and revivals of African-American theatre, is named in her honor. Singer and pianist Nina Simone, who was a close friend of Hansberry, used the title of her unfinished play to write a civil rights-themed song "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" together with Weldon Irvine. The single reached the top 10 of the R&B charts. A studio recording by Simone was released as a single and the first live recording on October 26, 1969, was captured on Black Gold (1970).Lincoln University's first-year female dormitory is named Lorraine Hansberry Hall. There is a school in the Bronx called Lorraine Hansberry Academy, and an elementary school in St. Albans, Queens, New York, named after Hansberry as well. On the eightieth anniversary of Hansberry's birth, Ado Andoh presented a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled "Young, Gifted and Black" in tribute to her life. In 2013 Hansberry was inducted into the Legacy Walk, an outdoor public display which celebrates LGBT history and people. This makes her the first Chicago-native honored along the North Halsted corridor. In 2013, Lorraine Hansberry was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

                                   His Works Included

• A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• A Raisin in the Sun, screenplay (1961)
• "On Summer" (essay) (1960)
• The Drinking Gourd (1960)
• What Use Are Flowers? (written c. 1962)
• The Arrival of Mr. To dog – parody of Waiting for Go dot
• The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964)
• The Sign in Sidney Burstein’s Window (1965)
• To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)
• Les Blanks: The Collected Last Plays / by Lorraine Hansberry. Edited by Robert Nemiroff (1994)
• Toussaint. This fragment from a work in progress, unfinished at the time of Hansberry's untimely death, deals with a Haitian plantation owner and his wife whose lives are soon to change drastically as a result of the revolution of Toussaint L'Ouverture. (From the Samuel French, Inc. catalogue of plays.)

·         A Raisin in the Sun produced in 1959, and debuting the revolutionary theater

·         scenery of the 60s, was praised for its irreverence of portraying the American dream as also possible for African-American citizens (Martins 72).

        The play tells the story of a poor to lower middle-class black family, the Youngers, composed by Lena (Mama), who is the head of household, Walter Lee Jr. (also called just Walter) and Beneatha, Lena's children, Ruth, Walter Jr.'s wife, and Travis, their son. Besides, there are the family's acquaintances Joseph Asagai and George Murchison, Beneatha's suitors, and Bobo and Willy, Walter's business partners and friends. The plot revolves around the arrival of Walter Lee Senior's insurance money, which is way overdue after his death, and the family's perspective toward the impact of such amount of money on their lives. Among the main issues discussed in the play, Walter's construction of his manhood and his constant craving for power within his household and for money to build his own business, a liquor store, are most highlighted. Moreover, the family's need of moving away from the apartment which symbolizes their lack of success in thriving in life is always in the background of every action taken during the play.

Chapter II

Diversity within similarity in A Raisin in the Sun

           Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun can be considered a turning point in American art because it addresses so many issues important during the 1950s in the United States. The fifties are considered an age of complacency and conformism, symbolised by the growth of suburbs and commercial culture. Sudden economic collapse results in domestic and racial tension. The stereotype of 1950s America as a land of happy house wises and black content with their inferior status resulted in an up swell of social resentiment that would finally find public voice in the civil rights and feminists movements of the sixties. A Raisin in the Sun explores these issues.

         A Raisin In The Sun is a revolution ran up swell of social resentments that would finally find public voice in the civil rights and feminists movements of the sixties. A Raisin In The Sun explores these issues.

         A Raisin in the Sun is a revolutionary work. In it Hansberry shows an entire black family in a realistic light. She even uses black vernacular throughout the play and probes deep into the important issues such as poverty, discrimination, and the construction of African American racial identity. It explores not only the difference between white and black society but also the strain within the black community over how to react to an oppressive white community. The play poses questions related to assimilation and identity. With the portrayal of the character of Joseph Asagal, the play also celebrates the African heritage as he calls for native revolt in the homeland.

       The play, A Raisin in the Sun, also addresses questions related to feminism and the need to have a patriarch and a topic on ‘abortion’. Beneatha illustrates the very idea that marriage is not at all necessary for women and women should have ambitious career goals. Ruth demonstrates the very idea of abortion as she thinks that the family may not be able to produce a space for the new one.

      A Raisin in the Sun portrays a few weeks in the life of the youngers, an African American family living on the south side of Chicago in the 1950s. The Youngers, Mama, Walter, Beneatha, Ruth and Travis are living in a ghetto. They are about to receive an insurance check for ten thousand dollars. It comes from the deceased Mr. Younger’s life insurance policy. Mama has a dream to own a house of own. Mr. Walter dreams of starting a liquor business. Beneatha dream of medical schooling and Ruth dreams of having bigger space for her family. In the end, Mama gets a house in the Clybourne Park and Walter invests money on liquor business and ultimately loses his share by his friend. Even when they move to Clybourne Park, Carl Lindner, a representative of Clyburn Park Apartment Association comes and asks them not to move in as they may not be wanted in the all white neighborhood. The dreams of the inmates of the house are shattered and thwarted. All lose hopes expect Mama who is optimistic.

    The main characters of A Raisin in the Sun struggle to deal with oppressive circumstances that rule their lives. The play has a reference to a conjecture whether those dreams shrivel up like A Raisin in the Sun.

 Each member of the family has separate, individual dream:

   Mama wants to own a house in the white neighborhood to assert her identity and existence.

   Beneatha wants to become a doctor.

   Walter dreams to invest money in a liquor shop

   Ruth and Travis want to have more space in a house.

The Youngers struggle to attain these dreams throughout the play and much of their happiness and depression is directly related to their attainment of, or failure to attain, these dreams. However, the play asserts that dream of a house is the most important dream as it unites the family. The whole play runs parallel to V.S.Naipual’s novel, A House for Mr.Biswas, where Mr.Biswas dreams of owning a house of his own.

Mr. Karl Lindner, the theme to fight racial discrimination operates and later in he play it becomes an important issue that the Youngers cannot avoid but face it. Karl Lindner has been sent by the covering body of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association as a representative to ask younger not to move into the all-White Clybourne Park neighbourhood.  Mr.Lindner and the inmates of the clybourne Park only see the Colour of the Youngers. Linder’s offer to Bribe the Younger to keep them from moving threatens to tear apart the Younger family and the values for which it stands Mama stands erect and Decides to fight against racial discrimination .Thus the play powerful demonstrate that the ways to deal with discrimination is to Stand up to it and reassert One’s dignity in the face of it rather than allow it to pass unchecked

Besider these two dominant thematic division, the importance of a united family also can be taken as an important issue of the play.

The Youngers struggle socially and economically but they are united in the end of the Play to realise their dream of buying a house of their own. Mama strongly believes in the  value of the family and even she teaches the same value to her son and daughter. In the end of the play Walter and Beneatha realize the value of the family. Even though Walter Should Compensate the loss of the family income,he has to stand united in order to reject Mr.Lindners racist Overtures. They become Strong and function as part of  a family fact they merge their dreams with the family overarching dreams of owning a house of their own.

           Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is an essential play of Black Modern Theatre. It opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959 as the first play by a black woman as well as the first to be black directed and produced. The same year, A Raisin in the Sun received the prestigious Best Play of the Year Award by the New York Drama Critics Circle (another first for a black author). Its appeal attracted both black and white audiences, and its production ran for nearly two years.  

         A Raisin in the Sun is set in the South Side of Chicago some time between the Second World War and the same date as its release. Its focal point, a black family, the Youngers, strive to move out of a ghetto and to ensure a better life for their children. After the family’s head, Walter Lee Younger (also known as Big Walter) dies, the family’s prospects of finding a way out of their poor surroundings become realistic. With money from Big Walter’s insurance policy, the family can afford to buy a piece of property and improve their living situation or Beneatha, Big Walter’s daughter, can pay for medical studies and pursue her dream or Walter Lee, Beneatha’s elder brother, can buy share in a liquor store to increase his fortune. Nonetheless, the money from the insurance policy is not enough for everyone and everything. The Youngers have to make decisions in a painful process with their different prospects, similarity and unity coming into play. 

         Hansberry’s play is not breaking any taboos or challenging stereotypes. One could successfully claim the story, especially the inheritance of ten thousand dollars, the plot’s catalyst, to be unrealistic. However, as the theatre historian C.W.E. Bigsby writes, 

         “the play precisely captures the mood of the civil rights movement as it then was, dramatising the various evasive strategies which the characters adopt as they struggle to make sense of their lives in a world made alien by their own crucial failure of nerve as much as by the more massive and definitional cruelties of the society which denies them access to its dreams no less than to its realities” (Bigsby 1985: 382). 

     Despite seeming calm natured and peaceful, A Raisin in the Sun is far from posing assimilation as the highest aim of blacks. Hansberry pictures the nature of blacks as not very different from that of whites, specifically in their middle-class ethics such as maintaining a stable job or respecting the value of education, however amalgamation of the two races is not seen as an ultimate goal. On the contrary, Hansberry celebrates the diversity and rich traditions within the African American community. She is not as radical in her views as 1960s and 70s writers or civil rights activists nevertheless she provides a solid basis for their attitudes. 

           During the play’s introduction on Broadway, Hansberry was embraced and celebrated as an author whose utmost determination was to prove that blacks were exactly like whites, and therefore full integration is possible without seriously disturbing social order or forcing a major forbearance. As her biographer Steven R. Carter suggests, “because this view totally distorts Hansberry’s social, political, and philosophical ideas as embodied in her art, acceptance of it makes any serious attempt impossible to study her craftsmanship, and ultimately her artistry” (Carter 20). This view was reassessed during the 1970s and 80s and furthered with the spreading of respect for minorities and the right to be different. 

           Her critics and admirers alike started to understand A Raisin in the Sun more as what it really is – as what Hansberry meant it to be –, as a celebration of a variety of views, attitudes and approaches to African and African-American tradition and community. The play shows blacks being a diverse part of the American population, not a consistent mass of illiterate people, as many whites tended to believe. In this light, the ultimate move of the Youngers to a white neighborhood appears more like a coincidence than an aim in its own right. The more so if one knows that Hansberry’s father made a similar attempt when he moved the family to a white middle-class surroundings near the University of Chicago without winning acceptance of his neighbors. Hansberry, sceptical about the move being an easy and idyllic solution to problems, perceived it rather as a start.

              The inheritance money is to Hansberry a pretext for the various dreams and aspirations of the members of the Younger Family. It may be a deus-ex-machina kind of device but once accepted, it is very effective. As a matter of fact, its basis is utterly justified. Carter notes that for Southern blacks (Big Walter and Lena) it was common to save a certain amount of money, no matter how small, each week to leave an inheritance. Furthermore, Big Walter’s intentions for his insurance policy, as Carter writes, were even stronger: “Big Walter understood that he had no chance to obtain a decent house, job, or life for himself and his wife Lena...; yet he wanted all of these things for his children...” (Carter 22). As such, Big Walter knew that the insurance money was the only way to provide his children with what he wanted himself within his means. 

           The inheritance enables the Youngers to challenge written and unwritten rules, which leave them in a ghetto. They confront boundaries which they have always known to exist but which they have never questioned. Carter accurately explains,  “the dreams the members of the family have about the money’s uses represent black America’s dreams that have been systematically suppressed by white racism. Walter Lee wants to enter business by becoming a partner in a liquor store; Beneatha wants to develop her intellect and be of service to humanity by practicing medicine; Ruth wants Travis to grow up in a decent home in a decent neighborhood; and Lena wants to save her family from the dissolution threatened by the internalized social and economic pressures embittering them all and exacerbating their resentments, jealousies, and envy toward each other” (Carter 23).  

             Since the money is limited for individual desires, the family is forced to make decisions and sacrifices, both critical and beneficial. Lena, the ultimate heir and the current head of the family, decides to place down payment on a house in a white neighborhood, and leaves the rest to Walter Lee with a wish there is money put aside for Beneatha’s medical training. Walter invests everything in the potential liquor business and subsequently loses his stake. Under these circumstances, he is likely to accept Mr. Lindner who is sent by their white neighbours to offer the Youngers to buy back their house. Walter Lee gathers the pride in himself in the last moment and refuses to let others dictate to his family. As his mother sees it, “He finally come into his manhood [that day]. Kind of like a rainbow after the rain…” (130). 

           Walter Lee acknowledges his links to his family, but also to his race and identifies with fellow blacks over struggles with racism. He is moved by a refusal to let white racist attitude dictate, and by a desire to obtain the material basis for a good life. As Carter sees it, “the plot confirms Hansberry’s … intentions; it reveals both the diversity of the family members, seen as representatives of the African-American community, as well as their unity and bravery in standing up to the insults, threats, and near-certain violence” (Carter 24). 

         Travis, Walter Lee’s son, is the seventh generation of the Younger Family. As Carter notes,  “[i]t could not have been possible were it not for Hansberry’s bold and subtle craftsmanship which enabled her to conceive of a plot, superficially of the frequently despised ‘kitchen sink’ variety, that could encompass so many of the deepest aspirations of her people through many generations. She stretched the domestic drama almost to the breaking point to include three hundred years of historical dreams and struggles as well as universal hopes and frustrations” (Carter 24). 

            Within a relatively small space, Hansberry has managed to capture a range of attitudes to life and social reality. The characters constitute their identity through the actions they take.

Moreover, she showed the richness with a colorful portrait of the African-American community through the varieties of language and music. However, this aspect was brought to light more after Hansberry’s death.   

          Special attention needs to be paid to the language variations exercised by Hansberry, her lively construct of characters; each of them employs a certain variety which adds fidelity.

In presenting the different speech patterns of Walter, Beneatha, and George Murchison, Hansberry asserts individual validity and acknowledges a full-fledged idiom, enriching both the American and African-American culture. Hansberry recognizes it as an ample variety spoken by people who do not consider themselves lower than anyone else. Most significantly, Walter Lee’s speech at the end of the play, repulsing the white attempt to control the family’s life, i.e. his answer to Lindner’s offer, is made in black English: “We don’t want to make no trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors. And that’s all we got to say” (128).

           Although Hansberry did not attempt to re-create the speech patterns with a scientific accuracy, she managed to preserve the basic rules and features of black English and to induce an air of reality while keeping it comprehensible to a large audience. Coming from the area, she shows how blacks of the South Side Chicago speak while highlighting how extensive education can modify speech, i.e. Beneatha’s case. Different speech patterns are noticeable in almost all dialogue:

Walter: Now what is that boy doing in that bathroom all this time? He just        going to have to start getting up earlier. I can’t be being late to work on account of him fooling around in there.  Ruth:   (Turning on him)  Oh, no he ain’t going to be getting up no earlier no such thing!  (14-15)  

Travis: (Eating)   This is the morning we supposed to bring the fifty cents to school.  Ruth:    Well, I ain’t got no fifty cents this morning.  Travis:  Teacher say we have to.  Ruth:     I don’t care what teacher say. I ain’t got it... (16)  

Walter: Mama – I don’t need no nagging at me today.  Mama: Seem like you getting to a place where you always tied up in some  kind of knot about something. But if anybody ask you ’bout it you just yell at ’em and bust out the house and go out and drink somewheres. (59)  

Walter: (All in a drunken, dramatic shout)   Shut up!...I’m digging them drums...them drums move me! (65)   

Walter: What the hell you learning over there? Filling up your heads – (Counting off on his fingers) – with the sociology and the psychology – but they teaching you how to be a man? How to take over and run the world? They teaching you how to run a rubber plantation or a steel mill? Naw – just to talk proper and read books and wear them faggoty-looking white shoes... (71)  

          The verb forms, multiple negatives, dropped letters, or grammar, i.e.“nagging at me,” “bust out the house,” “somewheres”, all render the the speakers’ backgrounds as easily identifiable. In fact, the preceding quotes represent examples of all the basic differences between black English and standard English that June Jordan lists in her essay “White English/Black English” and as they are reported by Carter: 

1. Black language practices minimal inflection of verb forms. 

2. Consistency of syntax: “You going to the store,” depending on tone, can be a question, a command, or a simple, declarative statement.  

3. Infrequent, irregular use of the possessive case.  

4. Clear, logical use of multiple negatives within a single sentence, to express an unmistakably negative idea.  

5. Other logical consistencies, such as: sometimes, and, therefore, somewheres (in Carter 30-31).

           Hansberry also reveals much about the only white character of the play, Karl Lindner. When he tells the Youngers that he and others from the Clybourne Park form a “community made up of people who’ve worked hard as the dickens for years to build up that little community; [t]hey’re not rich and fancy people; just hard-working, honest people,” (97) Lindner confirms his working-class background: he does not use eloquent grammar, nor does he depart from the norm. As much as the black English is diverse and rich in variations, the white majority is pictured as dull and boring.

          Hansberry is not only concerned with the characters’ diction, but also with their accent, which she instructs with in stage directions. Lena’s is “as careless as her carriage is precise – she is inclined to slur everything – but her voice is perhaps not so much quiet as simply soft” (27). Beneatha’s accent is “a mixture of many things; it is different from the rest of the family’s insofar as education has permeated her sense of English – and perhaps the Midwest rather than the South has finally – at last – won out in her inflection” (23). 

What Hansberry achieves with the characters’ use of language is a highly realistic picture, which aids the credibility of the characters. As Carter argues,  “more significantly, it again reinforces Hansberry’s depiction of the breadth of African-American culture, emphasizing that its language, society, and art are not monolithic entities. The variety of education and social levels, interests, opinions, and awareness of oppression exemplified by Lena, George Murchison, Beneatha, and the others finds its counterpart in the variety of their speech patterns” (Carter 32). 

        Another acknowledgement of the African-American culture is the use of music. Hansberry’s characters often sing, and usually it is the spirituals which accompany their lives.

Lena, for example, asks Ruth why she is not singing [that] morning and bids her to sing “No Ways Tired” as the song always lifts her up (41). Walter Lee finds the words to express his mood in a spiritual too: when he is excited, he starts singing “I got wings ... you got wings... All God’s Children got wings” (102). There is blues or jazz music often playing from the Youngers’ old radio completing the mood. 

        Hansberry clearly admires the achievements of blacks within the frame of American culture. She is highly aware of the social context that determined those accomplishments and of the price paid for them. Her priority is identifiable in all of her writings: showing the monstrosity of oppression and drawing attention to the struggle against it. Even though her play highlights black battle in particular, it displays a universal theme.  

        The Youngers represent a working-class family facing their class and race. As noted by Catherine Kodat, “[Hansberry’s] upbringing in one of Chicago’s wealthiest and most prominent black families … led her critics to wonder whether in fact she could be trusted to speak the truth of black poor and working class lives” (Kodat 155). Then Kodat explains:

“Hansberry herself imagines that her privilege ‘swaths her in white’; her only hope to break free from that coddling, infantilizing whiteness is to abjure her privilege and identify with her ‘ghetto… assailants,’ whom she invests with precocious maturity … that is directly tied to their impoverishment” (Kodat 157).

            Hansberry recognized her class privilege and wished to overcome it. She challenged criticism of the kind discussed by Kodat by explaining her conscious choice in interview with Studs Terkel in 1959:

“I come from an extremely comfortable background, materially speaking. And yet we live in a ghetto, ... which automatically means intimacy with all classes and all kinds of experiences. It’s not any more difficult for me to know the people I wrote about than it is for me to know members of my family. This is one of the things that the American experience has meant to Negroes. We are one people” (in Carter 45). 

        Racial oppression and specific instances of discrimination against the family might not be explicitly spoken of, however, its existence is implied. The Youngers’ living conditions are but one example. They are living in an overcrowded ghetto, five people of three generations sharing three rooms, one serving as a kitchen and living room, with a single window transmitting limited daylight, and a shared communal bathroom located in the hallway. To afford the apartment, all family members work: Grandmother Lena as a household help like Ruth. Walter Lee is a chauffeur and Travis carries groceries. None of these jobs require skill or professional training.  

          Lena, the head of the household, is a strong female. Although she possesses some of the stereotypical mammy-like features, she is not a matriarch. Lena is inquisitive, interfering, helpful, and loving. She raises her children with black pride and self-esteem. She lovingly shared these values with her husband. In Lena, Hansberry creates a strong female characterbackbone of her people, who is proud of her race and teaches it to her children.  When Lena asks Beneatha in the last scene of the play: 

“[c]hild, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain’t through learning – because that ain’t the time at all. It’s when he’s at his lowest and can’t believe in hisself ’cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right,” (125)   Hansberry notes the wisdom and experience gained by long-lasting suffering and resistance. 

          A major struggle for Walter Lee is the conflict of the differing values imposed on him. He finds the contradictions enormous and cannot balance them harmoniously. He is pushed by the American Dream which defines manhood in terms of material success, leading him into a dubious business with shady friends. Walter also feels the burden of racial pride and consciousness, which values manhood as an ability to face adversity and to fight it. As Turner comments,            “[Walter] resenting his economic dependence upon his white employer and his mother, defines manhood as the ability to support and provide luxuries for a family – a concept certainly accepted by most white Americans. [However] his mother defines manhood differently... She insists that a man must be the moral leader of his family: he must make the correct moral decisions and must possess the strength to require his family to accept those decisions” (Turner 5).   By refusing Lindner’s offer and taking his chances, Walter demonstrates clearly his values. 

         Beneatha, the most professionally ambitious, suffers from manifold discrimination. As a poor black woman she is fighting the society’s prejudices with admirable strength, and realizes she is afraid she may lose everything she has gained so far. When she learns that the money for her education is lost, she tells Asagai, her suitor, that: 

“I sound like a human being who just had her future taken right out of her hands! While I was sleeping in my bed in there, things were happening in this world that directly concerned me – and nobody asked me, consulted me – they just went out and did things – and changed my life” (113). 

          Although Beneatha is a well drawn character, there is a hint to be suspicious of. When describing Beneatha, Hansberry mentions pastimes including guitar lessons and horseback riding, for which she had to buy a fifty-five-dollar riding habit (35). This is taken into consideration when in the same scene Ruth refuses to give fifty cents to Travis for school. If the family is of a working class background, how can Beneatha afford to have such interests? Or vice versa, if Beneatha can buy a fifty-five-dollar habit, how is it possible that Ruth cannot

give Travis fifty cents?                                                           

          Whereas Carter sees this lapse as a “rare occasion [when], by concentrating exclusively on the moment and neglecting to see its relation to previous parts of the play, Hansberry, to a small but disconcerting extent, damages the whole” (Carter 62), Kodat points out that this indiscretion was only another proof to Hansberry’s critics that she was not fully familiar with the social background she depicted. Drawing to Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Kodat notes that “rather than resulting from a simple miscalculation, the false note arises from the larger problem of the play’s implicit class assumptions. Thus a ‘confusion’ emerges in Hansberry’s vision of the ‘dream deferred,’ a confusion very much generated by her difficulty in forging an argument for black equality that does not depend on an appeal to middle class assumptions” (Kodat 159).

           Ruth is the most neglected one by other characters and by critics. Her life is the most conventional and traditional one of all. She does not possess ambitions other than maintaining a peaceful and loving home with properly raised children. The new house is Ruth’s chance for being close to her husband and creating a loving atmosphere which she would like to bring her baby to. It is the sole reason for continuing her pregnancy. She is no weaker in her resolution to fight the prejudice of their new neighborhood than Lena or her husband.

The highest aim of the Youngers is to provide their children with a better life. As Big Walter reportedly used to tell Lena: 

“‘Seem like God didn’t see us fit to give the black man nothing but dreams – but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worth while.’ ... He sure loved his children. Always wanted them to have something – be something” (33).   

    Walter Lee, no better off than his father, himself surely wants to make a better future for Travis however oppression seems to have trapped his son. When Walter Lee asks him about future ambitions, Travis states, “a bus driver” (88).                  Travis is not very confident about what he may achieve. Seeing one’s parents struggling to maintain a mundane job which leaves them subservient, adding the possibly undermining character of school, does not encourage visions of a successful future. Nevertheless, historically, Travis comes from the generation who was to witness major societal changes, as described by Julian Bond in the introduction, himself of about the same age as Travis if he was an actual person.

        Travis is affected by the growing estrangement of his parents, worsened by racism. A lack of prospect of change or possibility of self-fulfillment does not build content lives. What Hansberry suggests is that life is not easy for anyone, but it may be worse for some of us. Moving out of the ghetto means a step forward, a step to a better life. This is a strong human imperative to move. 

         Lena Younger knows it too and the first chance she has, she buys a house where each of the Youngers will have their own room and dignity. She tells Walter Lee that “[i]t’s just a plain little old house – but it’s made good and solid – and it will be ours. Walter Lee – it makes a difference in a man when he can walk on floors that belong to him...” (78). When Ruth anxiously asks whether there were no other houses available, Lena answers that “[t]hem houses they put up for colored in them areas way out all seem to cost twice as much as other houses. I did the best I could” (79). All are aware of the possible problems their moving into an all-white neighborhood may bring. Still, they are triumphant about the prospect.  Moving in spite of the resistance of their neighbors is a symbol of black struggle.

            When Walter Lee refuses Lindner’s offer, he in fact refuses to accept the social status quo and shows his will to fight for his chance. He tells Lindner they do not want to make any troubles but try to be good neighbors meaning that they do not want fights, however are ready to fight.

Chapter III

Conclusion

        General mood in the society during the 1950s was not revolting. The crucial aim of the black population was to prove that as far as their values and desires are concerned, they are not remarkably different from their white counterparts. All in all, it had always been the core of their struggle against the white oppressor, although not before the Second World War were blacks able to see the results. The Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 are but a few examples of accomplishments. Lorraine Hansberry’s father, himself a pioneer of litigation to overturn existing statutes, won in 1940 a legal battle against a racially restrictive covenant that attempted to prohibit African-American families from buying homes in an exclusive area of Chicago. The Supreme Court decision in Hansberry v. Lee claimed such restrictions as unconstitutional.

        Pressure from the courts and from blacks themselves also impelled the pace of racial change. In 1947, the color line was breached in professional baseball when Jackie Robinson became the first black to play major-league. By the mid-1950s, blacks had established themselves as a powerful force in almost all professional sports. Within the government, President Eisenhower furthered the integration in the Armed Forces as he attempted to desegregate the federal work force. The 1957 Civil Rights Act provided federal protection for blacks who wished to register to vote; although a weak bill with few mechanisms for enforcement, it was nonetheless the first civil-rights bill of any kind since the Reconstruction. 

          Along with the legal battles, artists tried to prove that blacks are no less humans than whites. Such efforts are palpable in A Raisin in the Sun: the Youngers are decent, law-abiding, and hard-working citizens. Ironically enough, when Mr. Lindner dissuades them  from moving to Clybourne Park by saying that most of its current residents are “hard-working, honest people who don’t really have much but those little homes and a dream of the kind of community they want to raise their children in” (97), who else is he describing than the Youngers themselves? Moreover, the problems the Youngers face, estrangement of Walter Lee and Ruth, a generation gap between Beneatha and her mother, expressed by different notions of self-realization, are very similar to those which may appear in any family.

          Perhaps, it was inevitable that during the 1960s the focus of the racial struggle would shift away from the issue of (de)segregation to the far broader and more complex demands of poor urban blacks. As conditions in the black ghettos of most cities were excruciating, it was only a question of time when the problem of urban poverty becomes more important than legalized segregation. The turning point came in mid-1960s. Disillusioned with the ideal of peaceful change in co-operation with whites, an increasing number of blacks were turning to a new philosophy of “black power”. In its most moderate form, it was simply a belief in the importance of black self-reliance. In its more extreme guises, black power could mean complete separatism and even violent revolution. In all its forms, however, black power suggested a move away from the search for racial conciliation.

          As well as the political representation, the black theater radicalized during the 1960s. Many theatregoers, both blacks and whites, have denounced Baldwin’s and Baraka’s dramas as militant, radical, or revolutionary. As Turner notes, 

“as Black Arts drama developed during the final years of the 1960s, critics attacked the violence, the rhetoric, the emphasis upon separation of the races. If, however, one looks at presentations of dramas of black experience from 1953 to 1973, one discerns evolution: first, the black playwright’s vision of a world in which integration did not succeed but was honored because no other way of life seemed viable; then, the new vision of a world in which blacks live and act apart from whites” (Turner 12). 

          Therefore, Lorraine Hansberry could be accounted representative of the former, and authors like Ed Bullins and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka as those of Black Arts movement. A Raisin in the Sun advocates of the equality of blacks and whites, they lay a solid basis for authors who were active in the 1960s and who exercised more radicalism.

       A Raisin in the Sun also presents a sexualized view of the black man, and men in general, in regard to stereotyping his sexual conduct and desires. There are two major moments when it is made explicit. Walter Lee Junior, who could be considered the main character of the play, or at least the main male character, is the son of Lena, also called Mama, and Beneatha's brother. They all share the same house with Walter's wife, Ruth, and son, Travis. However, he is not the head of the household, but his mother, a fact whose relevance will be discussed further in this thesis. During a moment of frustration, for not being the head of household, Walter Jr. who seeks for peace in the streets is confronted by his mother as to whether he has a woman (or many) outside the wedlock. A Raisin are much more connected to gender issues than to racial issues and display a less prejudicial consequence to black men than objectification Deemed as potentially dangerous, black men have problems to improve themselves with regards to class, as well as to have access to goods such as education, justice, and health, as do alike material ones. Kendric Coleman points out that intuitions are not color blind; much to the contrary, he states, “black men in particular need to equip themselves with tools that allow them to navigate within American social institutions in order to increase social and economic mobility” (14).

As a consequence of institutional slavery, black people were denied to be part of

most mainstream institutions. By keeping those who are not part of them, for instance African Americans, excluded from their privileges, such institution and their members can maintain and reinforce their power and influence (Coleman 44). Regarding institutionalization and exclusion of the black figure: blacks in general have been thrust into primarily white social institutions . . . Most of these institutions have a hegemonic base and design and have paid little or no attention to the conditioning of African- Americans. Many African-Americans have proven that they can adapt to and benefit from these institutions, but many more would if the base of these institutions were redesigned with diversity in mind. (Coleman 13-14) Both Walter Jr., in A Raisin, and Richard, in Blues, are examples of black people's lack of access to social and economic mobility. Crime and institutions of justice are side-by-side when it comes to preventing the

African-American man to prosper. By repeatedly being caught by police officers for crimes they have not committed and subsequently being found convicted by the legal system, black men lose their beliefs in law and justice and start to fear justice figures such as judges and police officers, for they stand as their enemy. It is not surprising that news of white people committing crimes are taken as a shock, at the same time that black men are taken as the most probable people to be guilty of a crime, often being mistakenly convicted. These men are presented with hardships and few opportunities, which can make them anxious to achieve what is often taken for granted by white middle-class families The construction of masculinity based on social positioning and on fulfilling the role of the provider as major aspects in the formation of masculinity by the black male characters. None of them, though, is as strong as in A Raisin in the Sun.

The play depicts the frustration of the black man for not being able to achieve

white Americans' standards. Walter Jr. works as a driver, and as such, does not make enough money to provide for his family. Walter Jr. represents all of these values regarding his construction of masculinity, for the focus in the plot is his frustration for not possessing more, namely: economic resources and power within the household.

Throughout the play, Walter deals with situations which emphasize his different

positioning in society from that of a white man, mainly in fields considered to be

mandatory for achieving manhood, such as the business world. Walter thus comes to the realization that “being black and male in American society places one at risk for unemployment”.