WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Abstract:

This article analyzes how Black authors pushed back on white definitions of home that excluded Black residents of kitchenette housing. By performing a close textual analysis of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha (1953) and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), the article examines how these works use the abject space and positionality of the kitchenette and its residents to challenge the signification of home and the stigmatization by those who would always see Black lives as wanting. Ultimately, Brooks and Hansberry depict characters who refuse to capitulate to discursive confinement and instead trouble sociopolitical norms and structures and propose new ways of knowing and being to find agency and joy.