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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Lament As Transitional Justice, Michael Galchinsky
Lament As Transitional Justice, Michael Galchinsky
English Faculty Publications
Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the …
To Be A Man: A Re-Assessment Of Black Masculinity In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun And Les Blancs, Julie M. Burrell
To Be A Man: A Re-Assessment Of Black Masculinity In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin In The Sun And Les Blancs, Julie M. Burrell
English Faculty Publications
The first Black woman to pen a Broadway play, Lorraine Hansberry scripted a majority of male protagonists. Critics tend to see Hansberry’s depiction of Black men as either an unfortunate departure from her feminist concerns, or as damaging representations of Black masculinity. In contrast to such views, this essay maps the trajectory of Hansberry’s career-long project of scripting positive visions of Black masculinity, from the politically progressive, while still patriarchal, structures of masculinity in A Raisin in the Sun, to the heterogeneous performances of revolutionary masculinity in Les Blancs. Further, in her role as public intellectual, Hansberry questioned prevailing assumptions …