Lorraine Hansberry and Race Politics in Postwar American Intellectual Life

This essay reads Lorraine Hansberry as an important voice on U.S. postwar race politics and the Holocaust. The article argues that Hansberry’s 1964 play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, examines the vexed legacy of Nazism for American intellectual life in the 1960s . Critics have struggled to understand the play’s politics and its focus on a Jewish intellectual. This essay shows that Sidney is the key to grappling with the play’s radical politics, because he calls up the history of Nazi genocide as a proxy for other forms of racial and sexual violence. Moreover, the article examines how the play forwards a powerful indictment of an American countercultural intellectual elite that confuses its own alienation with the suffering of others. Sign forwards a Black Left feminist stance that imagines a place for Black and women intellectuals and shows that women’s self-realization cannot come about by racial identity or solidarity alone, but rather a politics that acknowledges forms of sexual and gendered violence

Art · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society