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Jean Genet's masterpiece Les Nègres was first published in 1958, in the midst of the Algerian war, and first performed at the Théâtre de Lutèce in Paris in October 1959. Yet even though the play is more than 50 years old, it remains a fundamental contribution to critical race theory, as Genet unequivocally posits that no matter what a black person does or doesn't do, simply to be black in our times is itself a tragedy. Placing Genet in the context of Negritude movement, Race and Sex across the French Atlantic equally reveals and examines blackness within the African-American dialogue with a white French author's provocative questions about race: \"Is a black man always black?\" and even more fundamentally, \"What is blackness?\" Within this framework, to question \"blackness,\" therefore, is to set out on an ontological quest, as \"blackness\" has become a real, living thing in its own right within European ideology, social theory, and historical consciousness, even as Les Nègres has taken its place as a major text in the francophone and philosophical tradition of writing on race. In essence, this book concentrates on the way in which language-particularly the French language-has shaped ideas about race within transatlantic discourses, and, with its companion, continental philosophy, has also shaped the historical understanding of discourse on race. It navigates between multiple readings of race within the French Atlantic using Lorraine Hansberry's play Les Blancs; Dany Laferrière's Comment faire l'amour avec un Nègre sans se fatiguer; Genet's dialogue with the Black Panthers; and different conceptions of the so-called N word. Race and Sex across the French Atlantic thus explores how Les Nègres offered a groundbreaking reading of how race functioned-and continues to function-as an all-pervasive discourse that provides a central principle around which society in general is organized. The play stages a deeply self-reflexive and critical examination of the very essence of

The Common Core State Standards mean major changes for language arts teachers, particularly the emphasis on \"informational text.\" How do we shift attention toward informational texts without taking away from the teaching of literature? The key is informational texts deeply connected to the literary texts you are teaching. Preparing informational texts for classroom use, however, requires time and effort. Using Informational Text to Teach Literature is designed to help. In this second volume (the first volume is on To Kill a Mockingbird), we offer informational texts connected to Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Readings range in genre (commencement address, historical and cultural analysis, government report, socioeconomic research study, and Supreme Court decision) and topic (housing discrimination past and present, abortion, the racial and cultural politics of hair, socioeconomic mobility and inequality, the violence associated with housing desegregation, and the struggle against the legacy of systemic racism). Each informational text is part of a student-friendly unit, with reading strategies and vocabulary, writing, and discussion activities. Teachers need to incorporate nonfiction in ways that enhance their teaching of literature.The Using Informational Text to Teach Literature series is an invaluable supportive tool.

The NEC, founded in 1967 at the height of the civil rights movement, explicitly aimed to culturally and materially improve the lives of African Americans by producing work about Black experiences, for Black audiences, and by Black theatre practitioners.! There were still some doubters: critic Walter Kerr in the New York Times thought the NEC were 'not yet an ensemble' and 'three or four quite different acting levels are applied to the Australian play\"; Richard P. Cooke in the Wall Street fournal thought the preview production that he saw was \"a little ragged in the early scenes\" - nonetheless, Cooke felt the \"final power' of the later scenes transcended those in the earlier Broadway production.\" According to Richards, Poitier had discovered Hansberry's script via a regular poker game he played with her husband Bob Nemiroff and the producer Philip Rose. Nemiroff had passed the script to Rose and '[o]nce they convinced Sidney to do it, then they could start moving\".'· Writing in the journal Freedomways in 1979, the producer and director Woodie King Jnr suggested that Raisin was the catalyst for the flowering of Black talent and opportunities for Black theatre workers in the decades that followed.\"

UK academics Kate Craddock and Helen Freshwater reflect on the ruptures created during this mandatory pause on theatrical activities as forming deep learning moments - and forging new critical and creative pathways: [T]he disruption did provide an opportunity to take stock of what is core to the experience of watching or witnessing performance, and enabled a re-evaluation of performance's place in our lives. McGillivray's detailed analysis of the cultural milieu at the time - focusing on the key players and political struggles - helps us to understand why this play about a quintessentially white Australian experience was transferred and translated to the contexts of a Black Community in New Orleans. Kate Hunter and Emilie Collyer's article offers a provocative challenge to traditional notions of performance, audience engagement and artistic creation through the case study of Kate Hunter's recent work, Near Sighted (2023). The authors argue that the work - which integrated theatre, visual art and sound installation - exemplifies the way in which devised performance practices can shape non-live artworks, expanding our understanding of what constitutes a performance.

After hearing a strange ticking sound, the narrator of “The Apple-Tree Table” tells us that he “made vigorous use of the flesh-brush, and bathed [his] head with New England rum, a specific once recommended to me as good for buzzing in the ear” (NN Piazza Tales 385). The mysterious condition of older brother Gansevoort’s mercury poisoning, or Mad Hatter Disease (hypothesized in my biography), and its symptoms of mental disorder, recall deceased father Allan Melvill’s deathbed ravings, linkable as well to Ahab’s absent leg, obsession, and mental dis-ease. The paper delves into Melville’s portrayal of Tommo’s health struggles, illustrating the intricate interplay between mind and body and the social, cultural, and psychological variables that influence health and well-being while challenging Western society’s individualistic and mechanistic ideologies surrounding human health. While the former later deplores “Lents, Ramadans, and prolonged ham-squattings in cold cheerless rooms” (NN Moby-Dick 85) as unhealthy, Queequeg might be said to be following some of the staples of present-day wellness or healthy living—intermittent fasting, meditation, and yoga.

Building on recent studies by Imani Perry and Soyica Diggs Colbert, as well as new work by Julius Fleming, this article argues that the various editions of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun are invested in a politics of untimeliness and unfinishedness that complicates common understandings of the play's meaning. By attending to the dialogue among the various versions of Raisin, readers are able to recognize the importance of untimeliness and unfinishedness to Raisin's \"radical vision.\"

[...]it played for one hundred and one performances, closing on the day of Hansberry’s death at the age of thirty-four. In all of Sidney Brustein’s confessions, retorts, and contrasting lines of argument, which notes did she hope would linger? [...]audiences have had few opportunities to experience this drama in all its startling intelligence and complexity. Accompanying BAM’s production at the Harvey Theater is a compelling exhibition, “‘Art Is Energy’: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder,” which has been installed in the Rudin Family Gallery in the foyer of the BAM Strong building and which is open to audiences before and after the show. Expertly curated by Soyica Diggs Colbert, the Idol Family Professor of African American Studies and Performing Arts at Georgetown University, it reproduces a pithy selection of photographs, letters, published essays, and typescript pages of Hansberry’s work, sketching an archival portrait of the playwright as “artist,” “organizer,” “activist,” and “radical intellectual” (fig. 2).2 Spanning the long hall of the gallery, the exhibition provides a nuanced introduction to Hansberry’s writing and activism for those previously unfamiliar with the breadth of her work. A typescript statement, “Neighbor to Neighbor: Notes to a Greenwich Village Meeting on ‘The Open Community’” (ca. 1962), defends the need for diverse urban spaces and testifies to Hansberry’s involvement with the most local forms of politics; for audiences of Sidney Brustein, it recalls the broadsides that Sidney initially refuses to publish in his own weekly Village newspaper.3 A clipping from Hansberry’s 1961 contribution to the Black intellectual magazine the Urbanite, consisting of a satirical dialogue between a Black and a white intellectual, seems to echo the testy conversations Sidney has with his friend Alton, the play’s sole Black character.4 A photograph of Hansberry speaking at a 1959 NAACP rally in Washington Square Park—an image no less striking for the fact that it has been frequently reproduced—emphasizes the playwright’s public-facing work and suggests that her embodied presence in the Village was always already politicized.5 Colbert’s exhibition draws from her own recent monograph, which repositions Hansberry’s dramas in relation to Black radicalism and existentialist philosophy.6 Her book, in turn, builds on the burgeoning scholarship on Hansberry, especially a new biography by Imani Perry, which has appeared since the playwright’s papers opened to the public in 2010.7 Integral to BAM’s staging of Sidney Brustein, “Art Is Energy” sensitively bridges the scholarly and artistic contexts for Hansberry’s writing, situating it within