On March 27, 2017, Georgetown University Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics presented Dreams Deferred: Crossing Continents and Cultures with ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ in celebration of World Theatre Day. The one-night event, moderated by Soyica Colbert, was in advance of the Arena Stage Mead Center for the American Theatre’s 2017 production of A Raisin in the Sun in Wahington, DC and productions in Sweden at the Riksteatern, directed by Josette Bushell-Mingo, OBE, and at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg, directed by James Ngcobo.
anticolonialism
On Thursday, March 22, 2018, the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will co-present Lorraine Hansberry: Reimagining Biography. In addition to the AMERICAN MASTERS documentary, Sighted Eyes|Feeling Heart, three biographical treatments of the artist, activist, and public intellectual will be published in the next several years. The four panelists will share how they navigated the feminisms, intersectionalities, political, and private-public voicings that shaped Hansberry’s life in their biographical treatments of the artist, activist, and public intellectual.
Over the last two weeks we have been sharing information about the panel participants as well as information about the Lorraine Hansberry Papers, held at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
On March 22, 2018, the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture will co-present Lorraine Hansberry: Reimagining Biography. In addition to the AMERICAN MASTERS documentary, Sighted Eyes|Feeling Heart, that aired on PBS in January 2018, three biographical treatments of the artist, activist, and public intellectual will be published in the next several years. Reimagining Biography panelists will be asked to address the feminisms, intersectionalities, political, and private-public voicings that shaped Hansberry’s life and her understanding of herself and the worlds she both lived in and created.
In 2010 the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture published an article, “Young, Gifted, Black, and Complicated: The Question of Lorraine Hansberry’s Legacy,” in their newsletter, Africana Heritage. In that article, Steven G. Fullwood, then Assistant Curator, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture puts the incredible legacy of Lorraine Hansberry’s contribution as an artist, activist, public intellectual, and writer into context.
The Harvard University Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) has made Robin Bernstein’s 1999 article, Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun available to the public. You can access and download the article here.
Stevie Wilson, a Black, queer, writer, activist, and student incarcerated in Pennsylvania, is the coordinator of, and participant in, a network of self-organized prisoner abolitionist study groups at SCI-Smithfield. On the website of the four study crews, Dreaming Freedom | Practicing Abolition, Stevie recalls a scene from Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in his essay, “Doing Abolition.”
The Lorraine Hansberry Documentary Project, LLC in co-production with Independent Television Service and Black Public Media won a Peabody Award for the American Masters documentary, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart, which premiered on January 19, 2018.
Last night Tracy Strain was awarded an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Directing in a Motion Picture (Television), adding to the recognition of the documentary, Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart that aired on PBS in January 2018.
Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry will be streaming for free courtesy of the UK’s National Theatre at Home beginning on Thursday July 2, 2020 at 7:00pm UK time (2:00pm EST, 11:00am PST).
Joi Gresham, director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust, introduces the life and work of American playwright Lorraine Hansberry, in relation to her final play, Les Blancs.
On the 62nd anniversary of the Broadway premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” Cornell West and Tricia Rose reflect on the Black literary tradition as they focus on the legacies of Lorraine Hansberry and Gwendolyn Brooks as revolutionaries and exemplars who are often misunderstood as the “darlings of the white liberal establishment.”