Location: Thompson Room, Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (map)
Dolan Hubbard
Professor and Chairperson of the Department of English and Language Arts, Morgan State University
W. E. B. Du Bois and the Luminous Darkness
In “Du Bois, Hansberry, and A Knock at Midnight,” Hubbard explores the “semiotic disjunctions and tensions” that electrify the audience during the penultimate scene in Lorraine Hansberry’s classic American play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Walter Lee Younger, the wound way too tightly protagonist, a few minutes before the clock strikes midnight in his long day’s journey into darkness and despair, in the words of his mother, comes into his “manhood.” At that moment, Walter, who proudly embraces his manhood, alters the audience’s perception of reality and redraws the boundary of a world that excluded the black subject from history. He now stands before them as a modern day Prometheus unbound. In short, Hubbard examines Walter’s transformation from a death-bound subject to one who repossesses the human in this signature scene in African American letters where the darkness gives way to the birth of brightness.
Free and open to the public. A question and answer session will follow the lecture. Please feel free to bring a lunch.