In proceeding with research for our blog, we wanted to contextualize the play and provide readers with a sense of the poignant and substantial historical, cultural, and social factors that surrounded the play and its subject matter. To that end, we each researched and wrote on different topics that were united by some theme that shed light on the context of A Raisin in the Sun. To understand the historical background of the play and how Hansberry’s life and beliefs may have influenced her work, several books concerning her life and writing (Sharadha, Y. S. (1998).Black Women’s Writing: Quest for Identity in the Plays of Lorraine Hansberry and Ntozake Shange. New Delhi: Prestige Books.; Bower, Martha Gilman. (2003).“Color Struck” Under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Kennedy.Westport, Conn: Praeger.) as well as a few journal articles (Carter, Steven F. (1985). “Images of Men in Lorraine Hansberry’s Writing.” Black American Literature Forum 19. 160-62.; Carter, Steven R. (1980). “Commitment amid Complexity: Lorraine Hansberry’s Life in Action.” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 7: 39-53.) were consulted. Researching the lawsuit that Raisin was partially based on presented an interesting challenge, in that it was not mentioned in any of the print sources or online articles. To find out more about the case, an article covering the case from the legal journal the University of California, Davis Law Review was used.
In addition to understanding how the author’s own experiences shaped the play, we wanted to explore the historical and sociocultural factors, specifically how African Americans were often discriminated against and how they were portrayed and perceived by white America, played a role in Hansberry’s writing. Wayne McMillan’s article, Pubic Housing in Chicago, 1946, addresses the pressing issues of the housing crisis in Chicago and what most families, especially African American families living in poverty were going through. Moreover, Loretta J. Ross’ article, African American and Abortion, from the book, Abortion Wars, focuses on the issue of abortion, particularly its impact on African American women in the 1950s and 1960s when abortion was still under much controversy. As Ruth Younger, similar to many other women at the time, was considering abortion, this article discusses the history and the societal changes about abortion. In keeping with the idea that Hansberry wanted to show that African Americans experienced the same trials and tribulations that white Americans experienced, this series of posts showed that all Americans went through many of the same problems the Younger family had to deal with.
Finally, we wanted to tie some of the ideas and themes found in the play as well as Hansberry’s other works to the background information that we had gathered. This article written by Steven R. Carter examines, again, the universality of Hansberry’s work and discusses Toussaint, which examines how even the “masters” of an oppressed society are oppressed in their own way. Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual was used to look at Raisin in a different context; in Crisis, Cruse offers a very critical review of Hansberry’s work, calling it a “glorified soap opera.” By looking at several different aspects of the context of and background behind A Raisin in the Sun, we were able to glean quite a significant amount of information that we would have otherwise missed.
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-Stephen Xue
5/25/09
