Lorraine Hansberry's Absurdity: The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window

Tuning into <em>Precious</em>: The Black Women's Empowerment Adaptation and the Interruptions of the Absurd

“…Indeed, given Loraine Hansberry's critique of absurdist theater after Samuel Beckett (that in that genre "blacks function as abstractions" in a "conversation between white men and themselves," and that "it offers an occasion for audiences to evade rather than confront the source of their pain in social reality, while using a sense of cultural rebellion to disavow such an evasion"), such a reading would be dangerous to a black feminist analytic aimed at reading power through the normative discourses of race, gender, and sexuality and witnessing power's unraveling in black cultural production. 39 Rather, my aim is to read the absurd elements of the scene as the marks of narrative, visual, and aural excess: the dog, the flashes of light, the hurtling snow, and the screech that halts the gospel tune might be read as indices of surplus desire. The film, that is, might activate both the affective labor necessary for consent to domination and the surplus labor of black feminist discontent.…”