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“Fearful of the written word”: white fear, black writing, and lorraine hansberry's a raisin in the sun screenplay

In 1959, Lorraine Hansberry was hired by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay for her award‐winning Broadway play, A Raisin in the Sun. By the time the film was released in 1961, over one‐third of the original screenplay had been cut. In this paper I undertake a rhetorical analysis of a particular historically contextualized instance of the cultural production of whiteness. Specifically, I trace the metamorphosis of “whiteness” through its journey from Hansberry's original screenplay to its transformation into a film mediated by Columbia Pictures' Hollywood production and marketing machine. Drawing on archival memoranda from studio executives, I examine the studio's editorial suppression of the screenplay as an example of the maintenance, containment, and repair of the cultural production of whiteness. Although both the theater and film version of A Raisin in the Sun unquestionably made significant contributions to the affirmative depiction of African Americans on stage and screen, the unfilmed original screenplay had presented the radical but unrealized possibility of contesting Hollywood constructions of whiteness.