African American Literature Research Articles

African American Canon and Criticism: Henry Louis Gates’s The Signifying Monkey

Henry Louis Gates in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (1988) examines the significance of the Signifying Monkey, a trickster figure in African folklore, and whose manner of speaking produces uncertainty and double meanings. He examines how the specific language usage of the Signifying Monkey is altered and appears in African American texts by analyzing the trope of the talking book in early slave narratives and contemporary African American literary works. Gates’s book is hailed as one of the most original and groundbreaking works, and critics’ responses in its twenty-fifth-anniversary edition show its continuing impact. However, it has also been criticized for an intertextual and apolitical reading of slave narratives and for reproducing essentialism of Black literature. Focusing on the trope of the talking book, I examine how Gate’s theory and related contentions reveal critical issues of the African American literary tradition and problems of canon formation, regarding the concept of distinctive and coherent African American aesthetics, elitism, and its relationship with African American readers.

Why Not?: Embracing the Historical Design of African American Literature to Bolster Its Representative Use in the Classroom

ABSTRACT Having grown up Black in America, the author reflects on his limited exposure to African American literature in school as well as his even more limited opportunity to see himself reflected in the mirrors of those texts. The article then extends into a framework for expanding the inclusion of African American texts in educators’ classrooms. Approaching the literature from a historical design perspective (concerning the purposes that gave the literature life and direction throughout its existence), the article divides African American literature into two groups – the texts that centre race and race matter and those that centre lives and lifestyles – in an effort to challenge educators’ understanding of both the literature and the people represented within it. The article acknowledges that, while perhaps different in design, both groups of texts speak to the humanity of African American students as the students exist both within and beyond the context of race.

“An Old Black Woman” and “Zora of Orange County” as Patriarchal Subjects

My essay unpacks what exactly is meant by the term “patriarchy,” and how this ideology impacts Black women’s lives. I take my definition of ideology from Louis Althusser’s Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970), in which he defines “ideology” as a way of thinking, and discusses how these ways of thinking influence social interactions (1300). Reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1945 poem, “An Old Black Woman, Homeless and Indistinct,” and Zora Neale Hurston’s 1928 essay, How it Feels to be Coloured Me through an Althussarian lens, we begin to understand how the patriarchy challenges Black women’s self-actualization. For example, in both Brooks’ and Hurston’s work, belittling diction emphasises how Black women are “always already” (Althusser 1304) infantilized by the patriarchy. Furthermore, both writers’ use of chremamorphism elucidates how patriarchal objectification disempowers Black women. Finally, Brooks’ and Hurston’s reliance on allusion suggests that Black women’s behaviour is conditioned by arts that reinforce patriarchal thought. While Brooks’ “Old Black Woman” is made to accept it, Hurston attempts to counter patriarchal oppression. Ultimately, I use Althusser to explore how Brooks’ “Old Black Woman” and Hurston are disempowered by patriarchal ideology as yet another means by which Black women’s behaviour is controlled. Insofar as they comment on the relationship between patriarchal and racist ideologies, Brooks and Hurston are early intersectional activists. We cannot continue our intersectional activism without first understanding what exactly we mean when we say the word “patriarchy,” and how this ideology impacts women—and in particular, Black women, like Brooks’ subject and Hurston herself. 
 Works Cited in Abstract: 
 Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 3rd ed., edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and Jeffrey J. Williams, Norton, 2018, pp. 1285-1311. 
 Brooks, Gwendolyn. “An Old Black Woman, Homeless, and Indistinct.” African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young, Penguin Random House, 2000, p. 289-290. 
 Hurston, Zora Neale. “How it Feels to be Coloured Me.” The Broadview Introduction to Literature: Literary Non-Fiction. 2nd ed., edited by Lisa Chalkyoff, Neta Gordon and Paul Lumsden, Broadview Press, 2018, pp. 40-43.

NIHILISM AND IMAGES OF REBELLION: A CRITICAL STUDY OF RICHARD WRIGHT'S NATIVE SON

Richard Wright (1908-1960) is one of the notable novelists of African-American literature. Native Son (1940) is one of his outstanding novels which received as a unique literary work of his time and still. Most of his writings call for liberation from the racial discrimination that African Americans experienced during the Great Depression (1929-1933) and beyond, notably in his novel of Native Son. This novel chronicles the poverty of a twenty year old black man called Bigger Thomas. It implicitly traces the gradual aspirations of Bigger to rebel against white prejudice. In this study, Nihilism is the scope of debate and Bigger with his surrounding is the range for that view of negation. Bigger exemplifies the revolted figure of his peers against marginality and nothingness. The present research is a critique to elaborate some of the tangible and intangible trajectories of rebellion pursued by Bigger Thomas. This treatise aims to reveal a sort of condemnation against apartheid and to cast the light on the resentment of Blacks for their nihilism. The images of rebellion shown in this research are to explain some of the psychological reactions when one is destined to be a subaltern. Consequently, rebellion identifies the hope of Blacks for which a release from the chains of being peripheral might be obtained. However, some images, as violence, are reversibly perceived to maintain rebellion out of a quagmire of nihilism. Key words: Bigger Thomas, Blacks, Identity, Liberation, Nihilism, Rebellion.

Marronage or Underground? The Black Geographies of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer

Abstract I combine a reading of contemporary scholarship on US maroon histories and the Underground Railroad—and the concomitant notions of marronage and the underground—with a reading of two recent works of African American literature: Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016) and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer (2019). Foregrounding the idea of Black geographies as a form of placemaking and “thinking otherwise” about land and water, I suggest that despite the differing, and at times contrasting, trajectories of maroon histories and the histories of Black flight to the North, African American maroon experiences and the Underground Railroad are conceptually connected in contemporary African American literature. I read the two novels as recent literary expressions of this conceptual link, which is played out via representations of relating to the land. By reimagining and intertwining marronage and the underground, both novels articulate a critique of settler-colonial and plantation modes of spatial practice, modes they identify as formative for US-American nationhood. They also, tentatively but forcefully, gesture toward alternative ways of being “above” and “below” the land while affirming African American connectedness to place.

Race, Sex, and God

Race, Sex, and God

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

Toward a Black–Queer Critical Rhetoricism

African American Gay Men

African American Gay Men

Lauri Ramey, A History of African American Poetry

Lauri Ramey, <i>A History of African American Poetry</i>

Racism And Homosexuality: A Scrutiny Of James Baldwin’s Select Novels

James Baldwin was a novelist and social critic from the United States of America. He was an illegitimate black child. With his works, however, he became a well-known writer in bisexual and LGBT African American literature. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, Giovanni’s Room, Tell Me How Long the Train Been Gone, Just Above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk are among Baldwin’s best-known works. This research article aims to demonstrate how homosexuality is shown in James Baldwin’s works. In the first novel, Baldwin carefully investigated and camouflaged the homosexual issue through John, who was searching for his identity, whereas homosexuality was clearly presented in Giovanni’s Room. Because of the success of Giovanni’s Room as a gay and white novel, Baldwin decided to make homosexuality the central focus of his succeeding works. As a result, Baldwin paved the way for the next generation of homosexual authors to research and discusses LGBT themes in his writings. Journal of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology ISSN: 1007-6735 Volume

Tangible Black Joy and Beyond: An Interview with Isiah Lavender III

Tangible Black Joy and Beyond: An Interview with Isiah Lavender III Shelby L. Crosby (bio), Terrence Tucker (bio), and Isiah Lavender III (bio) We are excited to interview Dr. Isiah Lavender III for this special issue of CLAJ. Dr. Lavender is one of the most prolific scholars of Afrofuturism of the last decade. His interest in race and science fiction, shown in 2014’s Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and 2017’s DisOrienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, has evolved into a significant interest in Afrofuturism, particularly in literature. His interest in Afrofuturism’s literary history and present contrasts Afrofuturism’s expansion into film, art, and music. Along with Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement and Literary Afrofuturism in Twenty-First Century (co-edited), his upcoming book Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson signals his interest in capturing and preserving the voices and experiences of some of the field’s most influential yet underappreciated voices. How do we define ourselves? How do others define us? These are the central questions that Isiah Lavender III answers in texts like Afrofuturism Rising and Literary Afrofuturism. Thinking about slave narratives as “laying bare a science-fictional American existence. Each of these black freedom fighters engenders the afrofuturist vista from antebellum America to the twenty-first century by creating a legacy of resistance.” It is this legacy of resistance, rooted in the “science-fictional American existence” that allows readers to understand the hope that lies within these narratives. Readers can also reimagine and redefine the notion of resistance in new terms, new words, and, perhaps, new worlds—new worlds that fugitive slaves had yet to imagine. As artists and scholars recover the voices and experiences that many have tried to erase, Lavender challenges us to consider that “Racism refuses to die even when the dead rise.” For him, the importance of Afrofuturism is not in happy endings or in easy solutions, but in the joy and possibility that lies in telling our own stories and continuing the search for the notions of freedom the fugitive slaves relentlessly pursued. 1. How far back can we trace the presence of Afrofuturism or Black Speculative Fiction in African American literature? Certainly, I think the presence of Afrofuturism can be seen in the spirituals and folktales prevalent in the black vernacular tradition of early America because songs and stories transported tired black bodies and black minds of the enslaved to more [End Page 175] hopeful places such as heaven. How could they not? For example, the spiritual “I Know Moon-Rise” engages outer space in evoking the moon and the stars, a physical actual heaven that Octavia E. Butler will extrapolate upon more than 200 years later in her great novel Parable of the Sower (1993), where the destiny of her imaginary religion, Earthseed, is to take root among the stars. Looking to the past to move into the future is surely Afrofuturist and absolutely related to the Akan concept of Sankofa first derived in Ghana. I do not think this concept occurred to the originator of the term Mark Dery when he invented the word in 1993 to frame a set of interviews with Samuel R. Delany Jr., Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose in the South Atlantic Quarterly. Dery did nominally have an African American future, technoculture, and prosthetic enhancement firmly in mind when he defined Afrofuturism, though that’s debatable since he used William Gibson’s orbital Rastas as an example. Delany brilliantly clapped back to this political error or cultural mis-step on Dery’s part with his skillful, even beautiful riff: You’ll forgive me if, as a black reader, I didn’t leap up to proclaim this passing presentation of a powerless and wholly nonoppositional set of black dropouts, by a Virginia-born white writer, as the coming of the black millennium in science fiction; but maybe that’s just a black thang…. (195) In short, Afrofuturism predates the founding of the United States from a skewed viewpoint even with the paradox of its being defined in the late twentieth century. I think the race of Dery himself has caused a bit of...

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement

“What Good is Science Fiction and Fantasy to Black People?”: Afrofuturism as Hope and Movement Shelby Crosby (bio) and Terrence Tucker (bio) In the essay, “Positive Obsession,1” Octavia Butler explores how she became a writer and, more importantly, why she chose to write science fiction (or what we now call Afrofuturism). Terribly shy, Butler’s love of science fiction and fantasy began as a way to escape and build worlds where she could be “a magical horse, a Martian, a telepath…. There I could be anywhere but here, any time but now, with any people but these” (128). To be anywhere but here is part of Afrofuturism’s appeal. While these worlds can explore the realities of being Black in our current world, it also creates new images and feelings about said world. And that’s what we hope this issue will do for y’all—we want these essays to expand your minds and maybe even change how you see the world as the 80th CLA Convention we organized in Memphis in 2021 did for us. That conference inspired us to develop this issue. We want to keep the conversations started there going. The convention’s theme, Afrofuturism: Diasporic Visions, carved out space to discuss explicitly the extensive presence of Black futurity, of race and technology, and of fantasy and science fiction as key parts of African American literary tradition. Black writers have always infused their work with speculative elements even as they chronicle Black life with unmatched forms of realism. And while we see Afrofuturism present in art, music, and fashion, as Isiah Warner III and Lisa Yasezk claim in their introduction to Literary Afrofuturism, “such powerful artistic statements derive from a much older entertainment medium: the printed word” which can “extend back to the writing of eighteenth-century poet Phillis Wheatley and nineteenth century abolitionist, solider, and journalist Martin Delany and continue today with the award-winning SF of Delany, Jemisin, and a host of other authors” (3). Our ideas for the convention and this issue stand on the shoulders of the Memphis native Sheree Renee Thomas, whose 2000 edited collection Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora served as a launch point to study Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as traditions that reach as far back as the production of African American literature itself, as well as the history of CLA, itself founded in Memphis and still committed to the study and teaching of Black literature and language. We felt it critical to explore the history this tradition [End Page 1] while simultaneously celebrating the contemporary explosion of Afrofuturism in the mainstream, embodied by 2018’s Black Panther, and the well-known, overdue credit that Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have begun to garner. These mainstream, public discussions of what Reynaldo Anderson has termed “Afrofuturism 2.0” appear at a crucial time in the history of Black folks because even as the technological advances and social media platforms that fuel this moment have brought Black people around the world more access, opportunities, and autonomy to be seen and heard, the external forces of white supremacy, colonialism, and market fundamentalism continue to oppress and dehumanize communities. Some of those forces have been emboldened over the last fifteen years as the post-Civil Rights, post-Obama period has failed to reverse the institutional impact of white supremacist hegemony. The persistence of police brutality and the explosion of mass incarceration, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the upsurge of white nationalism into mainstream rhetoric and policy have led many to abandon hope of ever achieving the equity that many have sought for generations. For some, the result has been the descent into the violence and apathy that engulfed the Black community in the 1980s and 1990s. The second, perhaps more insidious has been the abandonment of collective action in favor of an individualism that prioritizes the self-consciousness or assimilation of the one but rejects the philosophies of collective uplift over which activists, intellectuals, and artists battled deep into the 20th century. Historically African Americans relied on faith traditions, specifically through Black liberation theology and the black prophetic tradition...

Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst

Reviewed by: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst Matthew Calihman James Smethurst.Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. 227 pp. $26.95. Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. In 1965, Baraka left the racially and ethnically mixed bohemian arts milieu of lower Manhattan for a life in Black nationalist cultural and political work. He decamped to Harlem, and within the same year, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. For some observers, these changes were ruptures. But in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Charles Johnson argued that Baraka’s development was a single continuous struggle: “There is from the very beginning a tension in his thought [End Page 97] between modern leftist intellectualism and race politics, between international Marxism and black nationalism” (24). Although many critics have shown that Baraka engaged with Black nationalism in even his earliest writing, few have recognized how far back his engagement with Marxism went. As William J. Maxwell notes in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), the subject who first emerges in Baraka’s FBI file, opened in 1957, was at least “curious” about Marxist politics (117). But the crucial study here is James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), which transformed scholarship on Black Arts by surveying the movement’s various regional manifestations and by tracing its origins to midcentury intersections of Black nationalism, bohemianism, and Old Left working-class radicalism. The Black Arts Movement established Baraka’s personal and institutional connections to a Popular Front movement that survived up to his time. In Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Smethurst resumes his exploration of Baraka’s relationship to Marxism. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected. Smethurst considers Baraka’s historical materialist vision of the development of an African American culture, a Black nation, and a Black working class, the last of which, Baraka proposed, would play a vanguard role in an international communist movement. And in Brick City Vanguard as in The Black Arts Movement, place matters: It was in Newark, Smethurst argues, that Baraka learned to hear Black music as a kind of vernacular historiography of culture, nation, and class. Baraka’s Newark was a place where many thousands of Southern Black migrants, including his own parents, entered industrial modernity. Challenging most earlier accounts of Baraka’s family history (including many of Baraka’s own accounts), Smethurst writes that Baraka’s parents entered this world as working-class strivers and maintained a basically proletarian outlook even after they found their way to middle-class jobs. In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, among other social contexts, the Joneses and other Black Newarkers encountered European immigrant groups (most notably, Jews and Italians) in relationships that were determined by Northern Jim Crow but that involved cultural exchange. However, because the Great Migration continued through most of the twentieth century, the Black Newark culture in which Baraka grew up and to which he returned as an adult maintained a vital connection to its Southern Black roots; for example, the city’s Black musicians and audiences remained in touch with Southern blues styles.In some ways, the Newark in which this book places Baraka looks like the Northern metropolises in Richard Wright’s Marxist “folk history” of Black America, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). But whereas Wright’s narrative ends with a prophecy of Black people thronging hopefully into new interracial industrial labor unions, Baraka’s Newark story, as Smethurst recounts it, confronts a modern city in which racial caste persists and where the industrial...

James Monroe Whitfield's "The Vision": Apocalypse and the Black Periodical Press

The pessimism of James Monroe Whitfield's long, only partially preserved poem "The Vision" is possibly without parallel in antebellum African American literature. Mobilizing African American and broader American culture's preoccupation with the end of the world, Whitfield turns to allegory and apocalyptic prophecy to represent the massive scale of human sacrifice in a nation founded on enslavement and colonial domination. "The Vision" theorizes the regimes of oppression shaping the antebellum social order through what I term an apocalyptic aesthetic of annihilation, which emerges from the interaction of the poem's thematic, affective, and formal components. This aesthetic is concerned with imminent collapse of society and characterized by violent imagery, a tone of indignant despair, and an accelerated temporality conveyed by long, complex sentences and irregular, often inexact refrains. Serialized in Frederick Douglass' Paper and haunted by gaps resulting from the loss of its first canto, "The Vision" offers a chilling corrective to the newspaper's celebration of the progress of the antislavery cause, while the poem's prophecy of social destruction anticipates the possibility of its archival fragmentation.

Catherine A. Latimer: Librarian of the Harlem Renaissance

ABSTRACT In 1920 Catherine Latimer was the first Black librarian hired by the New York Public Library (NYPL). At the 135th Street Branch Latimer supported and collected the works of young Black writers and thinkers, helping to usher in the Harlem Renaissance. An archive of letters from that era demonstrates how closely she worked with the likes of Alain Locke and Claude McKay. Latimer also conferred with Black bibliophiles and librarians, including the library’s head curator, Arturo Schomburg, under whose leadership she managed the Division of Negro Literature, History and Prints. Over her twenty-six-year career at NYPL, Latimer worked with leaders in the Black community to fight racism within the library profession. Together with Schomburg and the dedicated staff of the Negro Division, Latimer helped organize and provide public access to one of the greatest collections covering the Black diaspora.

Gender and Racial inequality in James Baldwin’ Go Tell It on the Mountain and Claude McKay's, Home to Harlem comparative study.

Abstract&#x0D; In both Southern African literature and African American literature, racism is a big problem. The two are different, though, because the former were more resolute and brave in their fight against racism, which was covered by the "apartheid" law. While the latter were more passive and suffered from an identity crisis due to the overwhelming presence of whites, the former were due to many years of oppression, torture, and subjugation. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the gender and racial inequality in the literature of the African-American writers James Baldwin and compare the novels "Go Tell It on the Mountain" with Claude McKay's "Home to Harlem" with similar themes. In their novels, the two novelists are endowed with a great insight with which they write of difficulties that all humans encounter through a perceptive view of the stubborn, heart-breaking dilemmas that plague individuals of all races. Baldwin was considered a traitor to the black race for failing to face racism, and Richard Wright referred to him as a "fag." The writer Baldwin did not stick to the skin colour of his friends to look for a tangent between their lives and the history of racism in the United States. McKay was deeply interested about the culture of the black diaspora as a result of his strong dedication to black consciousness. McKay explores Harlem's wonder, excitement, and boundaries by recognising other places where the black community thrived in 1920s black America when he depicts black life and community concepts. Gender and Racial inequality are definitely our primary concerns. Both novels considers as a literary depiction of the reality of an expansive African diaspora in the early 20th century.

Representation of Feminism in African American and Dalit Literature

Mainstream feminism has remained an elitist concept in India with much less attention and significance in comparison to the feminism conception in western countries. The Indian feminist movement failed to represent the perspectives of the Dalit women that have been subjected in the Indian society since ages. Subsequently, the Dalit women were forced to initiate a separate movement to gain sustenance and representation in the mainstream social conduct. The theoretical representations of the Dalit women could also be drawn from American and African literature that shares experiences of Dalit feminism and subjection on a broader scale. Further, the research reflects Dalit feminism in terms of inclusive feminism that confronts domination of female community in India and elsewhere. Considering the Dalit woman’s writing, the glimpses can be found in the Indian vernaculars in the form of short stories. It is present in the form of Telugu Dalit writing that have been translated into English to reflect the perceptions of the Dalit women and their experiences in Indian discourse.

Aesthetics of Protest in Black American Literature: A Study of June Jordan’s Directed by Desires and Richard Wright's Native Son

The introduction of jazz and blues in the United States of America influenced the works of Afro American writers both in content and form. These jazz and blues musical songs were used as mediums to protest against racism, class, gender and other inhuman practices meted on the blacks in the United States. Although these songs were not formally written, they became a source of inspiration for writers afterwards in terms of themes and style. The later writers who changed to formal literature borrowed from the themes and styles of these jazz and blues musicians. This paper is signicant because it has examined the thematic preoccupation of June Jordan’ Directed by Desires and Richard Wright's novel, Native Son. Findings show that both writers were thematically and stylistically influenced by the jazz and blues era of art in Af ro American Literature. Data for this essay was collected via qualitative research methodology, while the postcolonial theory was adopted for analysis. The paper submits that themes of racism, class, gender and protest were features of the jazz and blues era which later writers modelled their works after.

Back to Black: African American Literary Criticism in the Present Moment

Abstract For more than a century, scholars of Black literature have sought to align a critical project focused on identifying and celebrating Black distinctiveness with a social project aimed at redressing racial inequality. This commitment to Black distinctiveness announces itself as a project on behalf of “the race” as a whole, but has always been, and remains, a project and politics guided in the first instance by the needs and outlook of the Black professional classes. Over the first half of the twentieth century, this cultural project achieved some real successes: politically, it helped discredit the moral and intellectual legitimacy of the Jim Crow order that in various ways affected all Black Americans; culturally, it placed Black writers in the vanguard of a modernist project predicated on multicultural pluralism. Since the 1970s the limitations of this project, culturally and politically, have become increasingly evident. Blind to the class dimension of their efforts, literary scholars continue to misrepresent the historical/political nature of the project of Black distinction as a property of cultural texts themselves. Overestimating the efficacy of race-specific social policies, these scholars disparage the universalist social policies that would most effectively benefit a majority of Black Americans.

Racial and Cultural Tension in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

The culture in which we are brought up shapes our traits and identity. When people move from one place to another, they get acquainted with new cultures. Then, they vacillate on the conflicting modes of dilemma – whether to follow the new culture or not. Cultural conflict arises when people cannot discard the original culture they carry from their birth. This paper explores how an African-American family confronts racial discrimination and culture clash in America, and how they react against the racial injustice. The voices that African-America people raise against racial discrimination and segregation are overtly or covertly represented in the African-American literature, as in the play- “A Raisin in the Sun”. This study explores the conflict between American culture and African culture in the play conceptualizing the theoretical frame work of cultural studies developed by Geert Hofstede and Edward Hall. This study answers the question: how does the African-American family (Younger family) confront the culture clash, and combat against racial discrimination in the play? The conflict between the Younger family and the white representative indicates the racial and culture clash between the African and the America culture as dramatized in the play.