The Williams Project Book Club Discussion with Charles Mudede

In preparation for their co-production with Intiman of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, The Williams Project has created special programming to encourage deeper audience engagement with playwright Lorraine Hansberry. To that end, they invite audiences to read Looking for Lorraine by Imani Perry. Following the closing of the show, The Williams Project will host a book club discussion here at Elliott Bay. Local cultural critic and teacher Charles Mudede will facilitate the evening's discussion. The Williams Project encourages audience members to pick up the book and read it ahead of time. They are also asking attendees to please RSVP here. Looking for Lorraine is Imani Perry’s multi-dimensional, illuminating biography. Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. Hansberry used her prominence in myriad ways: challenging President Kennedy and his brother to take bolder stances on Civil Rights, supporting African anti-colonial leaders, and confronting the romantic racism of the Beat poets and Village hipsters. Though she married a man, she identified as lesbian and, risking censure and the prospect of being outed, joined one of the nation’s first lesbian organizations. Hansberry associated with many activists, writers, and musicians, including Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, among others. Looking for Lorraine is a powerful insight into Hansberry’s extraordinary life—a life that was tragically cut far too short. Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born cultural critic, urbanist, filmmaker, college lecturer, and writer. He is the Senior Staff writer of the Stranger, a lecturer at Cornish College, and has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of which, Zoo, screened at Cannes. Mudede, whose essays regularly appear in e-flux, C-theory, and Tank Magazine, is also the director of Thin Skin (2021).

Event Links

Website: https://go.evvnt.com/1583636-0

Read More

View Less