A Raisin in the Sun Precise

Precise/ A Raisin in the Sun articles analysis

Jacqueline Foertsch’s “Against the "starless midnight of racism and war": African American intellectuals and the antinuclear agenda”
When reading A Raisin in the Sun, many references to bombs have been and will be read as references to racial bombings such as church, home, and freedom rider’s bus bombings. However, Foertsch analysis Hansberry’s multiple references to the racist tensions occurring during the time of A Raisin in the Sun, and claims that there is a the connection between her references and major events occurring worldwide. Foertsch claims that Hansberry’s consistent language used when referencing “bombs” and her allusion when a character discusses bombs in A Raisin in the Sun is meant, not only as a reference to the bombs being set of in America due to racial tension, but also to the above-ground nuclear tests that have been being conducted by Russia and the United States during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Foertsch begins to explicate this claims using several quotes from characters in the play and analyzing the language used and the ambiguity Hansberry suggests in each line.
“…The issue becomes whether the atomic bomb figures as similarly meaningless... In a later scene the tables are turned when…Ruth must preside over her own session of small-talk, "determined to demonstrate the civilization of her family." Following a remark about the hot weather--described in the stage notes as "this cliché of cliché’s"--Ruth indicates her knowledge of the atomic events she dismissed in a graver but more authentic moment at the opening of the play: "Everybody says [the heat's] got to do with them bombs and things they keep setting off. (Pause.) Would you like a nice cold beer?’ “ (4)…her jocular tone on this social occasion is hardly conducive to the introduction of such a serious subject about which we see later that Ruth cares a great deal. Too, the race-based reading ignores Ruth's comment about the unseasonably hot weather, popularly feared as caused by atomic bombings--and addressed in news media, including African American weeklies such as the New York Amsterdam News--since the days of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Hansberry was not only referencing the racial bombing occurring in America, but was such a talented artist she was able to also bring light to the bigger picture and reference the atomic bomb testing occurring in Russia and the United States.
Michelle Gordon’s “ ‘Somewhat like war’: the aesthetics of segregation, black liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun” A Raisin in the Sun is often read as and critically acclaimed as a play written to illustrate the conventional African American struggle. Gordon argues that A Raisin in the Sun was written to directly address Hansberry’s experience of Chicago racism, black oppression, and resistance.
“Hansberry offers an "aesthetics of segregation" to generate public testimony about urban black life, to represent her radically expansive notion of the real, and to provide a prophetic framework for anti-racist, anti colonialist movements gaining force in the US and the world. Within the competing realities of black and white life, she dramatizes Chicago's white supremacist social order, and exposes its connections to the Jim Crow South, capitalist enterprise, and colonialism. Acutely aware of the social organization and violence at the center of Chicago's near-absolute segregation, Hansberry stages a revolutionary intervention into the cyclical systems of ghettoization, proffering Raisin as a dramatic prelude and challenge to the racialized rituals of ghettoization, desegregation, and organized white resistance.”

Gordon suggests that Hansberry uses dramatization of the African American family life to show the levels of inequality and give an example to those who are against racism of what African Americans go through when facing dualistic racism. She explains Hansberry’s use of “genuine realism” which is a concept Hansberry explains as “imposes on work ‘not only what is, but what is possible…’” Through Hansberry using genuine realism, Gordon suggests that the purpose of A Raisin in the Sun was not only a story to tell about the struggle and hardship an African American faces, but for Hansberry to express what she experienced and saw personally and not only what is in the now, but also what can happen in the future.

Foertsch, Jacqueline. "Against the 'starless midnight of racism and war': African
American intellectuals and the antinuclear agenda." Philological Quarterly
88.4 (2009): 407+. Student Resources in Context. Web. 31 March. 2014.

Gordon, Michelle. "'Somewhat like war': the aesthetics of segregation, black liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun." African American Review 42.1 (2008):
121+. Student Resources in Context. Web. 31 March. 2014.