Review: Soyica Diggs Colbert's Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry
Reviewed by Shaun Armstead
Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry
By Soyica Diggs Colbert
Yale University Press, 2021
288 pages
Soyica Diggs Colbert’s Radical Vision eschews a traditional biographical account of artist-intellectual Lorraine Hansberry. Regarding Hansberry’s oeuvre as a “writing of her life,” Colbert asserts, that Hansberry used her work to creatively imagine an alternative way of being in the world through global collective emancipation. Thus, her writing was a source of her becoming in a world that persistently misunderstood — “misapprehended” — the playwright as well as her work. What emerges from this approach is a reimagining of the biographical genre to recuperate the radical elements of Hansberry’s imaginings of the “entangled” freedom pursuits pursuing civil rights — for Blacks, gays, and lesbians — anti-imperialism, and economic justice in the first two postwar decades. In so doing, Colbert offers an innovative approach to grappling with the contours and form of Black women’s intellectual production.
Unfolding across six chapters, Radical Visions chart chronologically the development of Hansberry’s radical politics. Hansberry’s writings — published and unpublished — expectedly take center stage in Colbert’s text as a result. The first chapter examines Hansberry’s move to New York in 1951 and her time at Paul Robeson’s Freedom during the height of McCarthyism. Predominant in this chapter is her reporting on the Sojourners for Truth and Justice (STJ). Colbert shows how STJ’s engagement with the Justice Department orchestrated “encounters” to articulate truths specific to Black women’s racial and sexual vulnerability in the United States. Their pursuit of justice on behalf of Black women transmitted to Hansberry a Black feminist politics that asserted Black women’s right to self-defense. Their articulation complemented lessons she had previously learned from her mother. Coupled with her travels abroad and engagements with the homophile movement, the first chapter excavates the winding and intersecting genealogical origins of Hansberry’s politics. In foregrounding her writings about and participation in multiple freedom struggles, a radical Hansberry emerge from the depths of the mythic representation of Hansberry as an attractive, married African American liberal darling. Chapter two elaborates on this argument via a re-reading of the most popular text in her canon, A Raisin in the Sun, restoring the radical politics inherent to the text. The third chapter interrogates Hansberry’s unpublished work to reveal her struggles to imagine freedom that simultaneously accounted for anti-Blackness, homophobia, and sexist social orderings. These chapters convincingly dismantle the notion of Hansberry having ever been a proponent of either liberal reform or the global ascendence of the settler colonial American nation.
Temporally overlapping, chapters four, five, and six constitute a triptych of her engagement with and critique of popular social movements and contemporary culture. The fourth chapter examines The Movement, a photo essay collaboration with SNCC reporting on Black southerners and Jim Crow. The fifth chapter studies Hansberry’s critiques of progressive white liberals’ interpretations of the ongoing Black freedom struggle. The final chapter grapples with her final creation, the play Les Blancs, situating the work in the political context of Cold War Black internationalism and Hansberry’s deteriorating health. These chapters closely outline Hansberry’s vision for freedom worldwide. Colbert conveys how writing fiction, particularly as a playwright, enabled Hansberry to “say what public debate left unsaid in order to get at the truths that prevented any true communion across race or class lines.” As evidenced in The Movement, being able to stage characters in particularly sociopolitical contexts for witnessing informed her nonfiction work as well.
Colbert’s engagement with A Raisin in the Sun is likely the most vital chapter to her argument and method given the popularity of the play. Combining both a re-reading of the text and chronicles the public’s misreading of it, Colbert recuperates Hansberry’s radical politics, submerged beneath the imposition of American liberal imperatives. Rather than a play pursuing an integrationist project during the civil rights era, Colbert draws attention to the Black internationalist and radical critiques of the American nation and property rights structuring the text. This restorative work enables Colbert to illustrate how Hansberry’s piece was popularly misunderstood. The misreading of Raisin triggered the public’s trapping of Hansberry into the ill-fitting category of Black heterosexual wife espousing liberal politics. Here, Colbert cites the press as particularly culpable in this enterprise, indexing the multiple times journalists misrepresented Hansberry’s identity and misquoted her statements in articles. Thus, Colbert shows how this misrepresentation produced an antagonism between Hansberry’s public and private selves. Discursive formations of Hansberry’s public self frustrated the writer who understood herself and politics in entirely different terms. From such a recuperation emerges a key point: the world found inconceivable the Hansberry who, as a transgressive creative, divested from a nation-centric freedom project. And, as Colbert illustrates, Hansberry understood the public’s misreading of her work and identity well.
Locating Hansberry’s politics in the worlds she created via writing underscores the value in Colbert’s approach. Colbert takes issue with traditional biography as signifying collective liberation through individual emancipation. Consequently, this genre is incapable of articulating Hansberry’s view that collective liberation enabled individual freedom, not the reverse. Her politics motivated Hansberry not to position her success as a model to follow. Rather, she mobilized her popularity and writing to amplify ideas animating civil rights, peace, and anti-imperialist movements. This critique is important for it points readers to how the biographical form recommits to the liberal subject. This aim is in opposition to Hansberry’s vision. Put simply, Hansberry’s life and work exceed the bounds of the biographical genre.
Somewhat a disciple of existentialism, Hansberry saw interpersonal encounters as foundational for self-making. But she also remained convinced that such interactions occasioned collaboration across difference. In so doing, Hansberry hoped to develop connections across differently situated persons, those participating in the encounter and those viewing it, witnesses. From this linking, Hansberry wanted to produce a more authentic, more just truth in service of collective liberation. In this way, asserts Colbert, Hansberry staged “encounters” offering perspectives and knowledge in opposition to hegemonic epistemologies. Such partnerships teemed with liberatory possibilities. A corner stone of her politics, this worldview shaped Hansberry’s creative expression.
Colbert’s method in Radical Vision is tailored to the artist-intellectual she studies. Analyzing Hansberry’s writing to recenter its radical elements foregrounds how Hansberry used her work to imagine a reality that the artist herself defined as “not only what is but what is possible.” In so doing, Colbert shows how Hansberry’s work enabled her to envision the global conditions required for pursuing a collective emancipation allowing her a holistic humanity as a Black lesbian woman. To be sure, Hansberry’s commitment to collaboration across difference remains curious. After all, if we understand her plays as gestures to collaborating with not only actors, directors, producers, and dramaturgs, but also viewers, we must linger over how her viewers disappointed her by failing to see the complex vision she offered. Yet I imagine Hansberry might see Colbert’s careful recuperative efforts as part of the “slow-burn” pursuit of freedom that re-understandings her vision in service of collaborating for a better tomorrow.
In her careful engagement with Hansberry’s archive, work, and self-making, Colbert demonstrates the considerations scholars should make in rigorously examining the embodied ideas Black women have historically offered. Her approach creatively responds to demands to take seriously Black women’s intellect and worldmaking. This alone would justify reading Radical Vision widely. Supplementing this reason is that the text offers us a guide to understand the interconnections between the host of inequalities structuring our time and how we might envision a collective response together.
Shaun Armstead studies Black women’s international history in the twentieth century. Her dissertation examines the international efforts of the National Council of Negro Women. She is a second-year pre-doctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia and a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University.