Radical Vision

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A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry

Soyica Diggs Colbert

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A “loving, lavishly detailed” (New York Times) and captivating portrait of Lorraine Hansberry’s life, art, and political activism—one of O Magazine's best books of April 2021

"A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind."—Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review (2021 Summer Reading issue)

In this acclaimed biography of Lorraine Hansberry, Soyica Diggs Colbert narrates a life at the intersection of art and politics, arguing that for Hansberry the theater operated as a rehearsal room for her political and intellectual work. Celebrated for her play A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry was also the author of innovative journalism and of plays touching on slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements. Hansberry was deeply involved in the Black freedom struggle during the Cold War and in the early civil rights movement, and here Colbert shows us an artist’s life with the background of the Greenwich Village art scene in the 1960s, the homophile movement, Black diasporic freedom movements, and third-wave feminism.
 
Drawing from Hansberry’s papers, speeches, and interviews, this book provides a new point of entry in the history of Black radicalism, and a new perspective on Black women in mid‑twentieth‑century political movements.

Soyica Diggs Colbert is Idol Family Professor of the College at Georgetown University.

"Brilliant. . . . Colbert mines Hansberry’s work as both a playwright and essayist. . . . As a scholar of African-American theater as well as literature at Georgetown University, Colbert is unparalleled in her understanding of both fields and Hansberry’s influence in each."—Imani Perry, New York Review of Books

“Colbert offers a luminous, Black feminist study of the life of the mind of one of our most formidable cultural intellectuals. Combining dazzling archival research with rigorous and expansive close-readings of rare documents and Hansberry’s rich range of dramatic works, Radical Vision attests to the fact that the world of the Black woman artist is ‘a story of ideas’ urgently in need of telling.”—Daphne A. Brooks, author of Liner Notes for the Revolution

“A rich narrative that takes readers on a journey through Hansberry’s intellectual life, as she reckons with some of the most difficult aesthetic and political problems of her time—and ours.”—Paige A. McGinley, Washington University in St. Louis

"This scholarly biography hits the mark as a fresh and timely portrait of an influential playwright."—Publishers Weekly

"A fully formed portrait of this brilliant, complex woman. . . . Recommended for enthusiasts of American literature, and anyone who is interested in learning more about this transformational woman, whose vision for the country is as relevant today as ever."—Library Journal

"Here is Hansberry resurrected from the archives, from her scripts, scraps and drafts. . . . Colbert adds detail and dimension to Hansberry’s work. . . . Loving, lavishly detailed."—Parul Sehgal, New York Times

"Colbert . . . has accomplished the mighty task of resurfacing and reconciling the many facets that Hansberry possessed. . . . A devoted and deeply felt account of the development of an artist’s mind."—Dave Itzkoff, New York Times Book Review

“Colbert makes the study of Hansberry’s literary work inseparable from her lived experience of complicating identity categories. This exquisite biography of Hansberry is groundbreaking.”—Margo Natalie Crawford, University of Pennsylvania

"Radical Vision, the new biography by Soyica Diggs Colbert, gives Hansberry her due as an activist of the first order who made the most of her all-too-short life."—Michael Giltz, BroadwayDirect.com, "Top Theatre Books to Read this Summer"
 

Winner of the 2021 Outstanding Book Awards from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education

2021 George Freedley Memorial Award Finalist
ISBN: 9780300264784
Publication Date: February 8, 2022
288 pages, 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
19 b/w illus.