When Lorraine Hansberry’s play, A Raisin in the Sun, came into production, it was met by critics with varying appraisals. On the anti-integrationist side was Harold Cruse, who deplored Raisin as “the artistic, aesthetic and class-inspired culmination of the efforts of the Harlem left-wing literary and cultural in-group to achieve integration of the Negro in the arts.”
Cruse also claimed that A Raisin in the Sun demonstrated that “the Negro playwright has lost the intellectual and, therefore, technical and creative, ability to deal with his own special ethnic group materials in dramatic form.”
On the other side of the debate are C.W.E. Bigsby and Richard A. Duprey, both of whom have praised Hansberry because she, in their eyes, transcends those “special ethnic group materials.”
Duprey claims that Raisin is full of human insights that transcend any racial “concerns,” and Bigsby praises her compassion and her understanding of the need to “transcend” history.
Basically, Hansberry’s work has become heavily involved in the continuing conflict between the ethnic criteria of social protesters and the “pro-integrationist’s ethos of love and reconciliation” (Brown 238).
A third representative viewpoint can be exemplified by Jordan Miller, who, when confronted with this kind of debate, responds with the art-for-art’s-sake thesis. “He refuses to discuss Hansberry’s work ‘on the basis of any form of racial consciousness’ or ‘in any niche of social significance,’ and insists instead on the critic’s ‘obligation’ to judge the dramatist’s work as ‘dramatic literature quite apart from other factors” (Brown 238).
These three viewpoints taken together demonstrate the tendency to isolate questions of structure or technique from those of social, or racial, significance. So when Hansberry’s play met the critics, their comments and criticisms fit pretty clearly into one of these categories.
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Brown, Lloyd W. Lorraine Hansberry as Ironist:A Reappraisal of A Raisin in the Sun. Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Mar., 1974), pp. 237-247. Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
