THE CRITERION COLLECTION, THE CURRENT -- Sarita Cannon is an associate professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches 20th-century American literature. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Journal of Popular Film and Culture, the Black Scholar, Ethnic Studies Review and MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
“Focusing on how the members of one black family living on the South Side of Chicago after World War II respond to receiving a $10,000 life-insurance check after the death of their patriarch, A Raisin in the Sun engages with many issues that remain salient for African American people nearly two decades into the 21st century,” Cannon writes. “Hansberry draws attention to gender, class, and generational tensions within black communities, relationships between African Americans and Africans in America, competing definitions of progress and success, and the ways in which structural racism affects the everyday lives of black people.”
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