Ghetto as heterotopia

Abstract EN

“To move on up a little higher” is the dream of the main characters, in both Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1983) (Hansberry 55).

Both works are set in Chicago ghettos which figure as stumbling blocks in the lives of the black community—represented by the Youngers in A Raisin in the Sun—and the Latino community—embodied by Esperanza—in The House on Mango Street.

The reader is struck by the characters' sense of entrapment in a place to which they are expected—yet refuse to—belong; hence their aspiration and, later, attempt to cross the border of their ghettos as a way to escape this painful existence in search for a more promising future.

The present research proposes a reading of these two textsin the light of Michel Foucault's “Des Espaces Autres” (“Of Other Spaces”) (1967).

Foucault's concept of “heterotopias” as “counter-sites” will be employed, attempting to explore racial and ethnic tension through examining the characteristics of “heterotopias” as present in the ghettos Hansberry and Cisneros portray.

Approaching both works from this perspective, the present analysis relies on critical race theory as the conceptual framework of this research.

In reading the ghettos in the texts as heterotopias, a close relationship between Foucault's concept and the postcolonial concept of “othering” will be established, paving the way for further connections between heterotopia—and what it stands for—and the basic tenets of critical race theory.

In the course of my analysis, it will be argued that “othering” is predominant in A Raisin in the Sun and The House on Mango Street through the confinement of the black and the Latino communities to their ghettos which can tenably be seen as “far-flung and sometimes unknown spaces, with eccentric or unacceptable human beings” (“Narrative and Social Space” 64).

Finally, in the course of the analysis, the following questions—among others—will be raised and answers to them will be attempted.

Is crossing the border of the ghetto the way to salvation? How far will escape help the characters out of their dilemma?