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This thesis examines the politics of black identity in African American literature during what has come to be known as the ‘age of three worlds’. Across four chapters, I analyse texts by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, exploring the way in which their writing plays out within and against the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and contemporaneous discourses of Civil Rights and black (inter)nationalism. In doing so, I explore the contrasting ways in which each of them displaces the binary logic that is typically seen as defining the 1950s, as a means of reconstituting both American and African American identity. Rejecting either/or identities, they all decentre prevailing notions of national and cultural identity by juxtaposing them with alternative spaces and temporalities, the result of which is a dual perspective that is simultaneously local and transnational. By extricating themselves, whether physically or intellectually, from a monolithic discursive framework, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry recast the idea of double consciousness famously articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead of being a self-negating non-identity that serves as the psychological corollary to African Americans’ marginalised status, ‘two-ness’ is transmuted into a privileged vantage point that allows them to both intervene on the world historical stage as empowered modern subjects and renegotiate their relationship with the United States. What this two-ness amounts to, I argue, is a kind of dissonance. ‘Dissonance’, Duke Ellington claimed in 1941, names black people’s ‘way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part’. The principle of introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music in order to generate new modalities of expression found in jazz is transposed into a social and literary context by the writers examined in this thesis. Each of them embodies and mobilises the socially grounded sense of being apart and a part alluded to by Ellington as a means of defamilarising normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In their place, they posit alternative forms of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it means to be both black and American in the middle of the twentieth century.

本論文期望藉由探究《陽光下的葡萄乾》一劇，對非裔美人在面對社會困境以及白人意識型態時，如何發展自我認同的議題啟發新的思考。蘿琳．漢司白瑞以寫實的寫作手法，呈現非裔美人在美國一九五○年代種族隔離區的生活。種族隔離政策(segregation laws)中，空間具有特別的指涉意義，因此本文選擇米哈依爾．巴赫汀(Mikhail Bakhtin)的「時空型」(chronotope)理論作為本論文的基本架構。由於劇本和其當代歷史相互輝映，歷史背景的研究可以幫助理解劇中人物動機；反之，由解析劇中情節和人物行為，亦可推測非裔美人的未來發展。 本論文分為四個章節。第一章提供作者生平、劇本、評論、以及理論架構的基本介紹。第二章有兩個主題：呈現作品如何反映歷史，以及從社會背景的角度詮釋角色。其中，弗朗茲．法農(Frantz Fanon)的《黑皮膚，白面具》幫助解釋部分角色的同化行為。第三章顯示非裔美人如何在白人霸權之下建立自我認同：在社會上表達訴求以對抗白人霸權，在文化上接納非洲本能和美洲文化，及在家庭方面堅守傳承下來的家庭尊嚴。史都華．霍爾( Stuart Hall)的離散理論(diaspora)特別用來處理其中同時具有非洲和美洲本質的文化議題。第四章則是本論文的結論，總結作者寫本劇的信念和目的。 / This thesis studies A Raisin in the Sun and expects to bring new inspirations of how African Americans develop their own identities confronting social plights and white ideology. With the realistic writing style, Lorraine Hansberry truthfully depicts and reflects African Americans’ life in the segregated ghetto in the 1950s. As space carries significant meanings in the enforced segregation laws, Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotope serves as the main theoretical framework of this thesis. The play is interconnected with its contemporary history, so we may interpret the characters by considering their historical background and infer the American blacks’ future path by scrutinizing the plot and actions in the play. This thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the author’s life, the play, the critical opinions, and the theoretical framework. In Chapter Two, there are two main issues: first, how this play reflects the historical background, and second, interpretation of characters in relation to their specific social contexts. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is applied to explain the potential of assimilation of some characters. Chapter Three reveals how African Americans under the white hegemony find their own identities in social, cultural, and family perspectives. The gist is that they must strive for the improvement of their social status, embrace both African and American cultural roots, and stick to their family pride. Stuart Hall’s theory on diaspora is useful to deal with the cultural identity which ambiguously covers both African and American essences. Chapter Four is the conclusion of the thesis that sums up the author’s belief and intention in writing the play.

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