Lorraine Hansberry as Ironist

Abstract

Ever since sixties reputation and significance of several established Black American writers have become issues in running ethnopolitical debates on Black American literature. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and LeRoi Jones, for example, have been at center of confrontations between militants and moderates, Black extremists and white liberals, integrationists and Black nationalists, and so on. And it is increasingly evident that Lorraine Hansberry has joined this list of controversial writers, especially on basis of her first play, A Raisin in Sun (1959). On anti-integrationist side, Harold Cruse deplores Raisin as the artistic, aesthetic and class-inspired culmination of efforts of Harlem leftwing literary and cultural in-group to achieve integration of Negro in arts. In other words, it is a most cleverly written piece of glorified soap opera, a second-rate play about workingclass Blacks who mouth middle class ideology. Moreover, alleged shortcomings of Lorraine Hansberry's integrationist philosophy are linked, somehow, with her supposed

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