“Africa Claiming Her Own”: Unveiling Natural Hair and African Diasporic Identity in Lorraine Hansberry’s UnabridgedA Raisin in the Sun

Abstract

In the phantasmagoric performance that begins the second act of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Beneatha Younger emerges with a short “close-cropped” natural style after cutting off her straightened hair offstage. Although this is a seemingly minor theatrical moment, hair in this scene and Hansberry’s work and life serves as a powerful dramatic signifier, a political tool for self-understanding and liberation, and a cultural bridge between African and African diasporic identity. Drawing from archival material concerning the original 1957 playscript, Tracy Heather Strain’s 2017 documentary Sighted Eyes/Feeling Hands, and recent scholarship, this article examines how Beneatha asserts her own body politics and corporeal scripting in her interactions with two romantic prospects, Joseph Asagai and George Murchison, to argue that her relationship with each suitor represents the complicated ways she wrestles with the meaning of the African diaspora. By embracing her natural hair and making deliberate aesthetic self-fashioning choices, Beneatha reclaims an ancestral African identity and cultivates a global Black consciousness that ultimately exceeds specific performances of dress, dance, and hair.