Young Gifted Black Talent: Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun"
Lorraine Hansberry's play "A Raisin in the Sun" was the first play produced on Broadway written by an African-American woman. According to Barbara Tepa Lupac "its commercial success opened the stage doors to other Black writers." (Lupac, 2002, p.1) For that reason alone, the 1959 play would have been a landmark achievement for the author. But the seismic impact of Hansberry's play was not simply the race or the gender of its author, but also in the way African-Americans were portrayed in terms of the scope and nature of their personal and familial aspirations. In "A Raisin in the Sun," the sister of the family, Beneatha Younger aspires to become a doctor. Benethea is not simply a symbol, but a woman who wrestles with her desire to fix the world and also to find herself. Beneatha's brother Walter loves his son and his wife, but rages against the confines of the narrow walls of the apartment where all the Youngers must dwell. Beneatha and Walter seek to move forward professionally in their lives, as a student doctor and a store owner, in an America filled
Simply the act of writing a drama that would need the financial support and cast for a then unknown Black woman playwright was a radical act. But Hansberry's use of an ordinary setting showed both desires Whites took for granted were unfulfilled in African-American lives and how the legacy of racism and colonialism were still alive in America despite the promise of American equality. The psychological difficulties of racism that the Youngers grapple with, the faith of the Younger parents (one dead, one living, both loving) in the family's ability to overcome insurmountable odds challenged stereotypes of what it meant to be Black, to be talented, and to be a loving Black family. This fusion of a need to create a new future that intellectually satisfies African-American young people and to understand their ancestry is a theme that still resonates today. The literary critic Phillip Uko Effiong notes"'Raisin' is the first major play by an African American to translate into dramatic form the European exploitation of the lands and peoples of Africa, and the ensuin
Some common words found in the essay are:
African American, Black White, Beneatha Walter, Tepa Lupac, Raisin Sun, Rasin Sun, Beneatha's Walter, Uko Effiong, Lorraine Hansberry's, raisin sun, black family, hansberry's play,
Approximate Word count = 719
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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