lorraine hansberry's play a raisin in the sun

On balance, A Raisin in the Sun expresses a more optimistic than pessimistic view of the world.

It is capacious, capturing an extensive range of interpretive meaning-making that we want (typically) 9th or 10th grade students to begin to become comfortable doing, but it also seems sufficiently narrow and focused on a fundamental question Hansberry herself was grappling with, over whether or to what extent America’s racial challenges and the particular condition of American urban common folk were solvable or transcendable. This became a strategic question considered by civil rights movement leaders of this period, and is one that has had residual permutations and lingering effects down through to the present moment.īut it is the second debatable issue that our partner schools have spent the most time with.

The third focuses on the sociological and historical matter in the late 1950s and on into the 1960s of racial assimilation versus racial nationalism or separation. The character binaries set up in this debatable issue lend themselves especially well to the Argument Face-Off activity. The first of these three DI’s directs student attention to characters and characterization in the play, particularly as these are used by Lorraine Hansberry to illustrate and develop the play’s concern with independence and autonomy, and how they reflect on the play’s other thematic concerns - racism, filial bonds and obligations, authentic manhood. Click above to download the debatable issues for ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ The three debatable issues that we have helped partner teachers organize their instruction around are these. We have worked with multiple partner schools on the work, and our projects have been honed through iterative implementations to focus on several debatable issues, but one in particular. Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun is a sturdy classic of 20th century American literature and African-American literature and history, and it deserves to be as widely taught in high school English classes as it is.

Lorraine hansberry's play a raisin in the sun