Selves and Counter-Selves in Lorraine Vivian Hansberry’s A Raisin in The Sun and Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye,

Abstract

This paper is an in-depth analysis of the social condition of the Blacks in America and their direct confrontation with prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed the whites to ignore the worse social conditions created by them for the Blacks until the last decades of the 19^th century. It examines “selves and counter-selves,” or double consciousness, in Lorraine. Vivian Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. By using cultural studies as the theoretical framework in the explication of these artistic works, this paper explores the ways in which recent American literature re-imagines the human self as porous and energetic and capable of deep inter-ontological communion with other open selves across space. Cultural studies, which first emerged as part of a tradition of British cultural analysis best exemplified by the work of Raymond Williams, generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with or operating through social phenomena, such as ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. The paper concludes that every “coloured man” in the United States has a sort of dual personality. This gives the African American a certain insight into what Du Bois termed “the gift of second sight.”.