The Quest For Identity

In 1959,A Raisin in the Sun won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award,which placed the author Lorraine Hansberry as the youngest American and the first African American to win this honor.As one of the significant civil rights movement activists in the 1950 s and 1960 s,Hansberry reveals how the Younger family,who are caught in an interstitial existence,struggle to move from the ghetto area to the white neighborhood and how they explore the more possibilities of being Africans.Identity continues being a dynamic,on-going and extremely controversial concept in our increasing divergent and fragmented post-modern world.The old notion of identity as a fixed and settled entity is now been challenged by identity as a changeable,floating and strategic process.This dissertation analyzes the identity construction of post-colonial subjects represented in Lorraine Hansberry's representative work--A Raisin in the Sun.Drawing on Homi Bhabha's post-colonial theory and identity theory in cultural studies,the dissertation examines African American's “in-between” status in Hansberry's work and explores how the African American characters negotiate their identities from three different routes: revisiting African history;merging into the dominating society;gesturing towards hybrid identity.This paper consists of three chapters besides an introduction and the conclusion.The introduction provides a general biography of Lorraine Hansberry,a brief summary of A Raisin in the Sun,a general review of commentary on A Raisin in the Sun,the significance of the study and the basic structure of the thesis.Chapter one analyzes Asagai's journal of identity building by seeking root in African culture and reveals the internalized racism within the ethnic group.Chapter two concentrates on Mama's strategies for constructing identity through merging into the mainstream society and explores the internal and external barriers during the process.Chapter three focuses on the tortuous process of Beneatha and Walter Lee's quest for identity.Floating on the peripheries of mixed cultures and vacillating on the African identity and American identity,they eventually obtain the self position by building a hybrid identity.The concluding part remarks a brief summary of the three routes for the post-colonial subjects in the process of identity construction.By delineating the African American character's struggle to positioning themselves,Hansberry interrogates the notion of unitary,settled,essentialist African identity and presents that,for the marginalized people,the identity-building process is a fluid,performative,political process of negotiation.