Chapter 27 - A Raisin in the (Fallen) Sun

Summary

Scholars have recently addressed a literary and cultural tradition of the black Pacific in Langston Hughes’s works. This chapter reads Hughes in ways that engage with the black and nuclear Pacific and offers a discussion of what the chapter terms a black nuclear Pacific and its heuristic literary genealogy that originated in Hughes’s fictional barroom interlocutions in the “Simple” stories. It begins with an analysis of the atomic landscape in the “Simple” stories by placing them within the context of US nuclear history. It then traces the genealogy of the black nuclear Pacific by reading across the archives and published literature by Hughes and other writers: Hajime Kijima, Hughes’s Japanese translator (and fellow poet), who experienced the atom bomb in Hiroshima; and Lorraine Hansberry, who took the title of her play A Raisin in the Sun from Hughes’s 1951 poem “Harlem [2]” that originally ended with the image of atomic explosion.