Confusion in a dream deferred: Context and culture in teaching A Raisin in the Sun

What happens to a dream half heard . . . we have decided to move into our house because my father-my father-he earned it for us brick by brick. We don't want to make trouble for nobody or fight no causes, and we will try to be good neighbors. And that's all we got to say about that We don't want your money.

-Walter Lee Younger, Jr., A Raisin in the Sun Show me the money.

-Rod Tidwell, Jerry Maguire

Some semesters ago, I taught a course called "American Literature of the 1950s" at a small (1,600 students), private, historically white, liberal arts college in the Northeast The course and the school were new to me, and the course itself was also new to the English department. Because my own research involves both African American and European American literature, I decided to draw on both traditions in my course. My reading lists included prose fiction ranging chronologically from John Hawkes's The Beetle Leg to John Barth's The End of the Road and including James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain, Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle, and Jack Kerouac's On the Road. For poetry, I chose works by Marianne Moore, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka, and for drama I decided on Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. In addition to the reading, students were responsible for a series of group presentations that would, I hoped, help them think about the literature within its historical context: presentation topics included McCarthyism and the Korean War, modernism and abstract expressionism, the civil rights movement, and the Beats and popular culture.

Discussion of Hansberry's play was preceded by a screening of the 1961 Columbia Pictures film adaptation the night before the class meeting (attendance was not required, but a substantial number turned out), and the class itself began with a student presentation on segregation and the emergence of the civil rights movement that touched upon such important historic events as Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks's arrest and the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott, and the emergence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The students involved in the presentation took their work seriously and did a marvelous job, opening with a brief clip from the PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize and then moving on to a series of compelling, and often quite sensitive, analyses that indicated considerable engagement with the topic. This presentation received an ovation from the class-the first, and only, student presentation so honored.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when later in that same class a significant number of students said they believed that Walter Lee Younger should have taken Karl Lindner's money-even though they agreed that the racist affront of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association, the crisis it provokes in the Younger family, and Walter Lee's ultimate transcendence in rejecting the bribe together constitute the ethical and dramatic center of the play. Despite what must have been my all too obvious amazement at this response, and despite my decision to extend class discussion of the play another day in order to "unpack" the assumptions that such a reading might entail, several students refused to give up the notion that, in rejecting the money and moving to Clybourne Park, the Younger family had made a mistake.

Here, I examine this classroom moment with the help of key concepts from cultural studies, in particular the notions of articulation and rearticulation, considered always in the context of Stuart Hall's suggestive restating of "ideology" as "a contradictory reality" (Larrain 57). My students' reaction reveals how discourse about race in contemporary U.S. culture is a "changing same";' intervening in that discourse requires an unusually nimble pedagogy. While it would be easy (and probably more than a little true) to chalk this event up to a crippling combination of my students' greed (which seemed to bleed into a certain racism) and my own ineptitude, to do only this would be to miss an opportunity to explore what such an incident can tell us about the workings of racial and class discourses in both academic culture and contemporary U.S. consumer culture. Toward this aim, I will pair a discussion of some of the challenges presented by A Raisin in the Sun in its mixing of conflicting racial and class discourses (challenges not recognized by my students and therefore, I would argue, that much more pertinent to an understanding of their problems with the play) with a brief analysis of the recent, enormously successful, Hollywood film Jerry Maguire, a movie that assigns an African American character, Rod Tidwell, the task of reconciling "integrity" with the pursuit of wealth and conspicuous consumption; Cuba Gooding, Jr. won an Oscar for his performance in the role? An understanding of the appeal of this film to the largely-white American audiences that have made it a box-office hit 3 will, I hope, make clear the presuppositions underlying my students' reading of A Raisin in the Sun.