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"...provide[s] new interpretations of Hansberry's
work and new insights into the subject that she explored."
MultiCultural
Review (print)
A Raisin in the Sun
is the first play by a black woman to be produced in a Broadway theater. First performed in 1959, before the civil
rights and women’s movements came to the fore, it raises issues of segregation,
family strife, and relationships between men and women that are representative
of the time, and timeless in their universality. This interdisciplinary
collection of commentary and 45 primary documents will enrich the reader’s
understanding of the historical and social context of the play. A wide variety of primary materials sheds
light on integration and segregation in the 1950s and 1960s; relationships
between African Americans and Africans; relationships between men and women
within African American culture; Chicago as a literary setting for the play;and contemporary race relations in the 1990s.
Documents include first-person accounts, magazine articles and
editorials espousing opposing arguments, excerpts from the works of
Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, bell hooks, Malcolm
X, and Richard Wright, and a selection of pertinent government documents
and eye-opening statistics. Many of the documents are available
in no other printed form. Each chapter concludes with study questions
and topics for research papers and class discussion, as well as lists
of further reading for examining the themes and issues raised by the
play.
In addition, this online sourcebook provides the user access to:
- Concordances of A Raisin in the Sun
- Video clip of Lorraine Hansberry discussing A Raisin in the Sun
- NPR Essay on A Raisin in the Sun’s Broadway debut,
including a video clip of Hansberry discussing the play
- Langston Hughes’
poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred,
lines from which the epigraph of Hansberry’s play are drawn
- Hyperlinked timeline
on the History of Integration and Segregation in the United States
- Hyperlinked timeline
of Africa and Africans, and African Americans
- Chicago Public
Library’s Web History of Chicago, with photographic essays of historic
neighborhoods
- Masculinity in
Crisis/Femininity in Crisis. This online site includes detailed explanation of
the distinctions between sex and gender, and essays on masculinity in
advertising and journalism.
- E-Texts to Thomas
Dixon’s The Clansmen and The Leopard’s Spots, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Carl Sandburg’s Chicago poems, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister
Carrie and more
- E-Texts to historical
documents including Plessy v Ferguson, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg
Address, Bill of Rights, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Brown Vs. Board of Ed
interactive experience and more
- Biographical profiles
of Lorraine Hansberry, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Marcus Garvey, Booker
T. Washington, Toni Morrison and more
- Glossary of cultural
references and historical idioms from
Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
- Web-based study
questions
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