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Lorine hansbury,s the raisin in the sun
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Ever since her rise to fame, Lorraine Hansberry has opened the eyes of many and showed that there is a problem among the American people. Through her own life experiences in the twentieth-century, she has written what she knows and brought forth the issue that there is racial segregation, and it will not be ignored. Her most popular work, A Raisin in the Sun, not only brought African Americans to the theater, but has given many of them hope (Mays 1461). Within this work, we find a “truthful depiction of the sorts of lives lived by many ordinary African Americans in the late 1950s” (Mays 1462). Though there is realism within her work, the idealism is never far away at all. Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun allows one to see that progress is made through an idealistic view of the world and that hope is the root of many changes people search for in life. It was not uncommon for African Americans to have a realistic view on the world during the beginning of the 1900s. Segregation played a major role in shaping the century. Many just accepted things the way they were and saw no future change. During the early and mid-twentieth century, African Americans had freedom within reach, but were held back by constant discrimination. Many white Americans believed that African Americans should not have the same rights as them, even after slavery was abolished and African Americans became “free.” “Most colored Americans still are not only outside the mainstream of our society but see no hope of entering it” (Weaver 1551). The Younger seemed very realistic at times because they were one of many African American families struggling to live happily in a time when discrimination was still common. There seemed to be no hop... ... middle of paper ... ... line is not perfect and one will surely come across a few loops, but acknowledging the changes that they come across is just the beginning of making great progress in the world. Works Cited Hansberry, Lorraine. “A Raisin in the Sun.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1471-1534. Print Mays, Kelly. “The Historical Significance of a Raisin in the Sun.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1461-1462. Print. Mays, Kelly. “The Great Migration.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2013. 1462. Print. Weaver, Robert C. “The Negro As an American: The Yearning for Human Dignity.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. New York, 2013. 1550-1554. Print.
In “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson, the three main characters that the story follows face a great deal of inequality and racial prejudice in both the Jim Crow south that they left and the north that they fled to. Through their stories, as well as the excerpts from Wilkerson that serve to dispel some of the common myths and to explain some of the inequalities that others faced, one is able to make many connections between the problems that Ida Mae, George Starling, and Richard Foster, among many others, faced in their time and the obstacles to equality that our society still to this day struggles to overcome. A large reason as to why these obstacles still exist is that many have preconceived ideas about African Americans and African American Communities. However, numerous obstacles still survive to this day as a result of certain racist ideas.
Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. New
The African-American Years: Chronologies of American History and Experience. Ed. Gabriel Burns Stepto. New York: Charles Scribner 's Sons, 2003.
Egerton, Douglas R. Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-consciousness, manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message f...
Everyone encounters struggle and “ain’t nobody bothering you” but yourself (1872). Many African Americans encounter hardships and conflict in their own lives because of their race. Before integration, not only were African Americans facing internal struggles but also the external struggles caused by prejudices. A Raisin in the Sun elaborates on the conflicts of African Americans when dealing with segregation, discrimination, and few opportunities to improve their lifestyle. Hansberry expresses her hardships as an African American woman without civil rights in the 1950’s through the Younger family and the decisions they make when confronting their own struggles.
Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 10th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2011. 950-1023. Print.
A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry is a dramatic play written in 1959. The play is about an African American family that lives in the Chicago South Side in the 1950’s. Hansberry shows the struggles and difficulties that the family encounters due to discrimination. Inspired by her personal experience with discrimination, she uses the characters of the play, A Raisin In The Sun, to show how this issue affects families.
Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun" and George Tillman's box-office hit Soul Food explore the hardships and trials of black family life, and through the characters, setting, and theme of both the story and the film, the issue of class and the search for community is discussed.
Work Cited:.. Hansberry, Lorraine. A. A Raisin in the Sun. 1958.
Tackach, James. A. A Raisin in the Sun. Masterplots, Fourth Edition (2010): 1-. 3.Literary Reference Center -. EBSCO. Web.
...awjoud, Sayed. “Dreams ‘Deferred’ But Identity Affirmed and Manhood Restored: A New Look at A Raisin in the Sun”. Studies in Literature and Language. 5.3 (2012): 30-39. Web. 3 Nov. 2013.
The struggle for financial security and success has always been prominent in the American culture. The idea of the American dream captures the hearts of so many, yet leaves almost all of them enslaved in the endless economic struggle to achieve high status, wealth, and a house with a white picket fence. In Arthur Miller's, Death of a Salesman, we see how difficult it is for Willy Loman and his sons to achieve this so called American dream. In Lorraine Hansberry's, A Raisin in the Sun, she examines an African-American family's struggle to break out of the poverty that is preventing them from achieving some sort of financial stability, or in other words the American dream. Both plays explore the desire for wealth, driving forces that encourage the continued struggle for dreams, and how those dreams can lead to the patriarchal figure’s downfall. However, the plays contain minor differences, which have a common underlying factor, that leads A Raisin in the Sun to have a much more positive outcome than Death of a Salesman.
Racial discrimination is defined as the act of treating a person/group differently then another solely based on their racial background. The play as its self-receive racial discrimination, because its author make history, and because of what she did she was talked about it. An historical significance about A Raisin in the Sun, is that Lorraine Hansberry earned the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the year’s best play. “A Raisin in the sun brought African Americans into the theater and onto the stage.” The word is that “the reason was tha...