The Politics of “Home” in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the complexities of “home” in Lorraine Hansberry’s prize-winning play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). While scholars have discussed how the home purchased by Lena Younger at Raisin ’s close signifies a radical challenge to and revision of the American Dream, few have explored the ways in which this literal home mirrors the psycho-social struggle of mid-century African Americans to attain, secure, and define a sense of place, or “home,” in the face of systemic socio-economic racism. I argue that the Younger family’s Clybourne Park home is more than a structural device used to catalyze the dénouement. Rather, this physical space illuminates the diverse psychological and ideological “homes” the Younger family seeks throughout the play, as Raisin probes the racially charged politics of home ownership particular to post–World War II Southside Chicago, investigates the viability and vulnerability of the various “homes” occupied by the Younger family in their attempts to find and “express” themselves, and confronts national myths of “home” that associate citizenship with property ownership. Understood in light of the gaps and inconsistencies in national narratives that proclaim “all men are created equal” but deny to some the rights and protections that belong to being at home, “home” becomes a complex space that is simultaneously material, historical, philosophical, psychological, and political. Lorraine Hansberry’s play recognizes the interconnectedness of personal and social struggles to feel “at home” in one’s nation, one’s community, and one’s own skin, and does not offer a blueprint for dismantling the “master’s house.” Instead, A Raisin in the Sun is a pluralist call for committed “builders” – those willing to use their diverse “tools” in concert to reconstruct vital homes and come closer to realizing the dream deferred: America as “home of the brave” and “land of the free.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".