The Subversive Potential of Black Joy:
Reimagining Protest In the Work of
James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry
by Sarita Cannon, Ph.D.
In “Sweet Lorraine,” James Baldwin recalls time spent
with his dear friend Lorraine Hansberry: “I would often
stagger down her stairs as the sun came up, usually in
the middle of a paragraph and always in the middle
of a laugh. That marvelous laugh. That marvelous
face. I loved her, she was my sister and my comrade”
(Baldwin xi-xii). In this moving eulogy to the brilliant
black playwright who died at age 34 in 1965, Baldwin
captures their shared commitment to bearing witness to
the injustices of their time as well as their delight in each
other and the world around them. For these two writers,
protest and pleasure were not mutually exclusive.
In this piece, I examine Baldwin’s 1963 jeremiad The
Fire Next Time alongside Hansberry’s award-winning
1959 drama A Raisin in the Sun, paying close attention
to the ways in which protest manifests not simply as
a critique of systematic racial oppression, but also as
an expression of love for self and community. Both
writers demonstrate the ways in which black pleasure is
a necessary and surprisingly subversive element of the
revolutionary spirit.
Protest lies at the heart of African-American literature.
As Black people in the United States have long expressed
their experiences of living in a country that depended
on their labor for its very existence but refused to
acknowledge their humanity, creativity, and agency,
critics too often view Black literature as solely political.
As Toni Morrison puts it: “The discussion of black
literature in critical terms is unfailingly sociology and
almost never art criticism” (cited in Conner ix). Certainly,
there are works of propaganda that masquerade as art;
but I would argue that for many Black writers, the social
and the aesthetic can never be separated. Toni Morrison’s
statement about her own work, that “a novel has to be
10
african Voices
Ruby Dee and Sidney Poitier in A Raisin in the Sun.
socially responsible as well as very beautiful,” resonates
with my reading of James Baldwin and Lorr