Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun ROBIN BERNSTEIN When Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959, the vast majority of white critics praised the play's "universality." One reviewer wrote, "A Negro wrote this show. It is played, with one exception, by Negroes. Half the audiences here are Negroes. Even so, it isn't written for Negroes .... It's a show about people, white or colored .... I sec 'A Raisin in the Sun' as part of the general culture of the U.S.'" The phrase "happens to be" appeared with remarkable frequency among reviews: the play was "about human beings, who happen to be Negroes'" (or "a family that happens to be colored") ; Sidney Poitier played "the angry young man who happens to be a Negro."4 Other white reviewers, however, praised the play not for its universality, but for its particularity. "The play is honest," wrote Brooks Atkinson, critic for the New York Times. "[Hansberry1has told the inner as well as the outer truth about a Negro family in the southside of Chicago at the present time."5 "This Negro play," wrote another reviewer, "celebrates with slow impressiveness a triumph of racial pride.',6 How can a play be simultaneously specific and universal? This apparent paradox is easily resolved with the assertion that African-Americans are precisely as human - and African-American cultures just as universal or particular - as members of any other group. Hansberry herself pointed out the nonexistence of the paradox: Interviewer: The question, I'm sure, is asked you many times - you must be tired of it - someone comes up to you and says: "This is not really a Negro play; why, this could be about anybody! It's a play about people!" What is your reaction? What do you say? Hansberry: WeHr,] Ihadn't noticed the contradiction because I'd always been under the impression that Negroes are people .... One of the most sound ideas in dramatic Modern Drama, 42 (1999) 16 The Critical Reception ofA Raisin in the Sun 17 writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific.7 Hansberry's solution to the apparent paradox did not go unnoticed or unremarked . Novelist John Oliver Killens and historian and editor Lerone Bennett, Jr., for example, both noted Hansberry's ability to be "universal in her particularity ."s The paradox, then, is that a paradox was perceived at all, or that it continued to be perceived after Hansberry (and, later, Killens, Bennett, and others9) had publicly resolved it. Why did critics persistently categorize Raisin as either universal or specifically black? Why, when critics noted the fact that the play successfully communicated both universal and particular concerns, did they remark on this fact as a paradox or contradiction? In other words, why was the appearance of a paradox created and maintained? This essay attempts to tease out some of the meanings fueling and produced by the creation and maintenance of the apparent contradiction between universality and particularity. Although the focus, obviously, is on A Raisin in the Sun, the same apparent paradox is constructed for many other artistic works from the past and present. This essay, then, (a) lays groundwork to analyze the apparently contradictory claims that a piece (any piece) is both "universal" and "specific" to a minority experience and (b) helps illuminate the reasons for a cultural need for the appearance of the paradox. The claim that the play's characters are universal "people" without specific ties to African-American culture appears simply racist ("This is a well-written play; white people can relate to it; therefore it cannot be a black play"). Conversely , the assertion that the play is not universal but exclusively specific to African-Americans - that is, that the characters exist outside the category of "human" - seems equally racist. Upon closer examination, however, it is possible to discern both racist and anti-racist impulses in each claim. The "particularizing" assertion can be separated into several different strands. In the most racist form, critics in this mode refused to acknowledge any difference between Hansberry...