A review by colin_cox
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
5.0
Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun asks a series of interesting and important questions about how people of color fashion a viable identity in a predominately white world that defines success through the capitalist accumulation impulse. Walter Lee exemplifies the tensions of this dynamic but so does Beneatha, even if the particulars of her situation are fundamentally different. Beneatha is less seduced by white hegemony than Walter Lee, but the simple fact that Hansberry makes it an option speaks to the limited terrain of possibilities present in an overwhelmingly white and capitalistic society. By absorbing all differences into the vast, amorphous signifier "white," whiteness, symbolically speaking, obscures radical dissent by eliminating, through consumption, any viable alternatives. Simply put: everything exists in the shadow the white signifier casts.
In A Raisin in the Sun, segregation functions as an example of symbolic white absorption. Segregation reinforces white hegemony by articulating the necessity of division predicating on racial difference. The fact that whiteness can undertake the consumption of contradiction speaks to its power. However, whiteness twists the antagonistic division at the heart of segregation (segregation does not endeavor to bridge gaps, instead it aspires to maintain them) by suggesting division is reconciliation. Put another way: we reconcile differences by sustaining the difference. This is why the Younger's decision to reject the Clybourne Park payout is so radical. They reject the vampiric power of whiteness by, ironically enough, embedding themselves in a white neighborhood.
I have read A Raisin in the Sun once before, but this time it resonated in ways it did not before. Like Rachel, a play I read a few weeks ago, A Raisin in the Sun deftly dramatizes the exploitation people of color confront in the United States.
In A Raisin in the Sun, segregation functions as an example of symbolic white absorption. Segregation reinforces white hegemony by articulating the necessity of division predicating on racial difference. The fact that whiteness can undertake the consumption of contradiction speaks to its power. However, whiteness twists the antagonistic division at the heart of segregation (segregation does not endeavor to bridge gaps, instead it aspires to maintain them) by suggesting division is reconciliation. Put another way: we reconcile differences by sustaining the difference. This is why the Younger's decision to reject the Clybourne Park payout is so radical. They reject the vampiric power of whiteness by, ironically enough, embedding themselves in a white neighborhood.
I have read A Raisin in the Sun once before, but this time it resonated in ways it did not before. Like Rachel, a play I read a few weeks ago, A Raisin in the Sun deftly dramatizes the exploitation people of color confront in the United States.