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Abstract
In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry was hired by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay for her award‐winning Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun. By the time the film was released in 1961, over one‐third of the original screenplay had been cut. In this paper I undertake a rhetorical analysis of a particular historically contextualized instance of the cultural production of whiteness. Specifically, I trace the metamorphosis of “whiteness” through its journey from Hansberry's original screenplay to its transformation into a film mediated by Columbia Pictures' Hollywood production and marketing machine. Drawing on archival memoranda from studio executives, I examine the studio's editorial suppression of the screenplay as an example of the maintenance, containment, and repair of the cultural production of whiteness. Although both the theater and film version of A Raisin in the Sun unquestionably made significant contributions to the affirmative depiction of African Americans on stage and screen, the unfilmed original screenplay had presented the radical but unrealized possibility of contesting Hollywood constructions of whiteness.
Notes
Lisbeth Lipari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Denison University. Correspondence to: Denison University, Granville, Ohio 43023, USA. Tel: (740) 587‐5766; E‐mail: lipari@ denison.edu. A previous version of this paper was presented at The Colors of Rhetoric: A Critical Symposium on Race, Communication, Media, and Counter‐Racist Scholarship, Southwestern University, September 2002.
Langston Hughes, “Harlem,” in The Collected Work of Langston Hughes, Volume 3, The Poems: 1951–1967, ed. Arnold Rampersad (Columbia MO: The University of Missouri Press), 74.
Lorraine Hansberry, “Toward a New Black Leadership,” Monthly Review Anniversary, 15 May 1964, in Lorraine Hansberry Speaks Out: Art and the Black Revolution (New York: Caedmon Cassette, 1964).
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Library of America, 1986), 547.
Arthur Kramer, “Letter to David Susskind,” 30 December 1959. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, David Susskind Papers.
George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 1.
Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 81 (1995): 292.
Ronald L. Jackson II, “White Space, White Privilege: Mapping Discursive Inquiry into the Self,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 52.
Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 10.
Birgit Rasumssen, Eric Klinenber, Irene Nexica, and Matt Wray, “Introduction,” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, ed. Birgit Rasumssen et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 1–24.
Manning Marable, Blackwater: Historical Studies in Race, Class, Consciousness, and Revolution, (Dayton, OH: Black Praxis Press, 1981), 75.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 194.
Dyer, 40. Also see Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002); Shelby Steele, “I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?” in Color, Class, Identity, ed. J. Arthur and A. Shapiro (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
Brenda Cooper and David Descutner, “ ‘It Had No Voice to It’: Sydney Pollack's Film Translation of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 228.
Lauren R. Tucker and Hemant Shah, “Race and the Transformation of Culture: The Making of the Television Miniseries Roots,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (1992): 327.
Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness' Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal of Communication 61 (1997): 253–278.
bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 36.
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Dell, 1962), 128.
The story in its broadest contours reflects one part of Hansberry's autobiography. In the late 1930s Hansberry's father moved the family from Southside Chicago to a home in a white neighborhood and legally challenged racial restriction clauses. He successfully pursued the case to the Supreme Court (Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32).
James Baldwin, “Sweet Lorraine,” in To Be Young, Gifted and Black, ed. Robert Nemiroff (New York: Vintage, 1995), xviii.
Ben Keppel, The Work of Democracy: Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, and the Cultural Politics of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 183.
Eric King Watts and Mark P. Orbe, “The Spectacular Consumption of ‘True’ African American Culture: ‘Whassup’ with the Budweiser Guys?” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 2–3.
Amiri Baraka, “ A Critical Reevaluation: A Raisin in the Sun's Enduring Passion,” in Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun, ed. Robert Nemiroff (New York: Vintage, 1995), 19.
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: Quill, 1984), 263; Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York, Continuum, 1990), 198.
Eric King Watts, “African American Ethos and Hermeneutical Rhetoric: An Exploration of Alain Locke's The New Negro,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 19.
Lorraine Hansberry, “Make New Sounds: Studs Terkel Interviews Lorraine Hansberry,” American Theatre, November 1984, 5–41. (The article is a transcript of a radio program that originally aired in Chicago on 12 May 1959.)
Kimberlee Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlee Crenshaw et al. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 357–383; Barbara Smith, “Introduction,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table—Women of Color Press, 1983).
Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 205.
Keppel, 182.
Keppel, F184. Consider, for example, Bogle's description of the film: “Even though the film celebrated integration and ultimately paid homage to the America of free enterprise and materialism, it mirrored a timeless sense of oppression and despair.” In Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks, 198.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 330.
Bakhtin, 281.
Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, ed. Robert Nemiroff (New York: Signet, 1992), 5. Hereafter page numbers are cited in parentheses in the text.
Margaret Wilkerson, “Introduction,” A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, xxxv.
Lipsitz, 2.
Lipsitz, 99.
Stephen Carter, Hansberry's Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Arthur Kramer, “Memo,” 1. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, David Susskind Papers.
Dana Cloud, “Hegemony or Concordance? The Rhetoric of Tokenism in ‘Oprah’ Winfrey's Rags‐to‐Riches Biography,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 13 (1996): 133.
Janice Peck, “Talk About Racism: Framing a Popular Discourse of Race on Oprah Winfrey,” Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 89–126.
Debian Marty, “White Antiracist Rhetoric as Apologia,” in Whiteness: The Communication of Social Identity, ed. Thomas K. Nakayama and Judith N. Martin (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1999), 65.
Contrary to this statement, the screenplay does not open in the Holiday household but segues to the Holiday scene only after all five Youngers have awakened, and Travis and Walter have left the apartment.
Kramer, “Memo,” 2.
Kramer, “Memo,” 4.
Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness' Rhetorical Silence,” 256.
Samuel Briskin, “Sam Briskin's Notes on Raisin in the Sun,” 2. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, David Susskind Papers.
Kramer, “Memo,” 2. The soap‐box oratory refers to a scene Hansberry wrote for the film in which an African American street orator decries and succinctly describes the relationship between race and class oppression in the U.S. and compares U.S. racism to European colonialism.
Teun Adrianus van Dijk, Elite Discourse and Racism (Newbury Park: Sage, 1993). Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (New York: Longman,1995).
Kramer, “Memo,” 3.
This scene was also in the play. In the screenplay version, when Mama asks Beneatha why she wouldn't want to marry the rich suitor, George Murchison, any more than he or his family would want her, she responds: “Because the Murchison's are honest‐to‐God real live rich colored people, and the only people in the world who are more snobbish than rich white people are rich colored people. I thought everybody knew that by now” (74).
Kramer, “Memo,” 3.
Briskin, 3.
Kramer, “Memo,” 3.
Briskin, 3.
Briskin, 4.
Briskin, 8.
Kramer, “Memo,” 6.
Interestingly, the opening shots of the movie version of West Side Story, another Broadway hit of the late 1950s that was made into an academy award‐winning film in 1961, illustrates the kind of opening Hansberry seemed to have in mind – panoramic views of the city that eventually narrow to the ghetto neighborhood where the action begins, an opening sequence that requires about three minutes.
Bangs, “Fan Letter,” 1961. Wisconsin Historical Society Archives, David Susskind Papers.
The first of these two speeches occurs at the climax of act one, when Mama excoriates Walter for failing to “be your father's son… Your wife say she going to destroy your child. And I'm waiting to hear you talk like him and say we a people who give children life, not who destroys them…” In Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (New York, The Modern Library, 1995), 59. The second speech occurs at the climax of the final act, when Mama chastises Beneatha for failing to love Walter, even at his worst: “There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing…” (129).
Eugene Archer, “Raisin Director Plans Two Films,” New York Times, 10 June 1961, 12.
Lorraine Hansberry, “What Could Happen Didn't,” New York Herald Tribune, 26 March 1961, 8.
Carter, 1991.
Spike Lee, “Commentary: Thoughts on the Screenplay,” A Raisin in the Sun: The Unfilmed Original Screenplay, xivi.
For an early exploration of the distinction between modern and old‐fashioned racism see John B. McConahay, Betty B. Hardee, and Valerie Batts, “Has Racism Declined in America? It Depends on Who is Asking and What is Asked,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 25 (1981): 563–579. See also McPhail.
Mabs Segrest, “The Souls of White Folks,” in The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, 43.
Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 46.
Lorraine Hansberry, Lorraine Hansberry Audio Collection (New York: Caedmon, 2001).
Mark Lawrence McPhail, Double Consciousness in Black and White: Identity, Difference, and the Rhetorical Ideal of Life. The Van Zelst Lecture in Communication, Northwestern University School of Speech, 1991, 14.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the “Racial” Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983), 120.
Marty, 51.
Frye, 113.
McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited, 187.
Daniel Bernardi, “Introduction,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema, ed. D. Bernardi (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 5.
David Roediger, “Introduction,” in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. David Roediger (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 6.
Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 547.
bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 169.