“You tired, ain’t you?”: Time, Imagination, an Aesthetics of Subtlety, and the Politics of Emotion in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun

abstract: This article examines Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun in an effort to advance two major claims. I demonstrate how Hansberry’s most famous drama pivots on what I call an “aesthetic subtlety”—that is, an aesthetic form that is subtle in its form, yet radical in its political content—to advance often overlooked critiques of capitalism and its attendant ideology. The second claim highlights how Hansberry’s drama is attentive to how emotions and the imagination are constitutive of time, and vice versa, by focusing on how characters remember the past and imagine the future.