Lorraine Hansberry’s Existentialist Routes to Black Internationalist Feminism

This chapter examines Lorraine Hansberry's investments in existentialism in order to show that her play about African revolution, Les Blancs (1970), is a culmination of both her Black queer feminism and her internationalism. Hansberry framed Les Blancs as a response to Jean Genet's internationally acclaimed play, The Blacks—an absurdist meditation on power and race in the context of African decolonization; she attacked what she saw as the corrosive effects of The Blacks' existentialist despair and negation of revolutionary praxis. The chapter then argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex provided theoretical scaffolding for Hansberry's Black internationalist feminism. As such, Beauvoir helped Hansberry interrogate dominant views of tragic lesbians, critique heteropatriarchal norms, and represent homosexuality as a political choice with implications for revolutionary movements.