Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry, and: Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart directed by Tracy Heather Strain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry by Imani Perry, and: Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart directed by Tracy Heather Strain Amani C. Morrison Imani Perry . Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry. Boston: Beacon, 2018. 256 pp. $26.95. Tracy Heather Strain , dir. Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart. American Masters Pictures, et al., 2017. 118 min. Lorraine Hansberry (1930–65) has received renewed attention thanks to the 2010 opening of her archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the sixtieth anniversary of the debut of A Raisin in the Sun on Broadway. She was the first Black woman to integrate her residence hall while a student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and the first African American playwright to win the Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play. However, her legacy is much more nuanced and complex than even these “firsts” suggest. In works that creatively take on traditional genres, biographer Imani Perry and documentary film director Tracy Heather Strain respectively offer fresh perspectives on the young and vibrant playwright, essayist, and human rights activist. Taken together, the two works challenge the circumscription of Lorraine Hansberry’s legacy to her landmark play, A Raisin in the Sun, and chart out a personally, politically, and artistically expansive terrain of Hansberry’s contributions. Framing her exploration as a “third person memoir,” Imani Perry composes what she calls a “portrait of the artist” in her 2018 monograph Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which has been honored as a 2019 PEN awardee, a 2018 New York Times Notable Book, and a 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction winner, among others (1, 7). The title riffs on the title of Isaac Julien’s 1989 avant-garde film Looking for Langston, which explores and reflects on Hughes’s rumored queerness through a creative pastiche of archival [End Page 251] footage and performed enactments of Black male queer desire during the Harlem Renaissance. In so directly borrowing from Julien and with resonant subject matter at hand, Perry positions her take on Lorraine Hansberry’s life at the outset as a creative and archival exploration of the artist’s queerness. While much of the subject matter is not primarily (if at all) about the playwright’s sexuality, a substantial portion is, making this text groundbreaking. Moreover, the content that does not touch directly on Hansberry’s sexuality nevertheless engages with her as a queer subject as Perry continually reflects on the artist’s position outside of the mainstream: in her international leftist politics, in journeying off the beaten path both figuratively and literally with respect to her experiences in remote creative enclaves, and in pushing the bounds of convention as a critic of her own work. Broken into eleven chapters and bookended by an Introduction and Conclusion, Perry’s monograph takes readers through thematic and more-or-less chronological periods of Hansberry’s life: her childhood, her family’s sociopolitical outlook, and her college years; coming into her own as a young adult, writer, and international political radical with Communist Party affiliations; her close yet ambivalent marriage to Robert Nemiroff; her sexuality and romantic relationships with women; the critical reception of A Raisin in the Sun; her friendships with Black icons Nina Simone and James Baldwin; her relationship to race and her family’s legacy as civil rights advocates as explored through her plays; her radicalism on the home front; her retreat and illness at Croton-on-Hudson, New York; and her final decline and memorial. In chapters four through seven, the book crescendoes, featuring the longest chapters and most revealing content of Lorraine’s life story. The central chapter, “Raisin,” is the longest of the eleven and focuses on the critical reception of Hansberry’s signature work. Roiled by the play’s widespread critical “misperception” (as Perry describes it)—as either universal to the point of race being inconsequential to the drama, or steeped in and misguided by middle-class values (cue Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka)—Lorraine took it...