Framing the Problematics of Choice and Legacy: A Reading of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson as a Dilemma Tale

The choice for a particular narrative architecture has been a major concern for the literary writer and to the African American literary writer, the use of African oral literary elements has been a resourceful option. The present study hypothesizes that August Wilson uses the dilemma tale as a narrative architecture in his The Piano Lesson play and argues that this narrative style helps Wilson to frame the dialogic surrounding what legacy is to the African American. The study reveals that tradition is problematic for the African American to conceive. The conclusion is that the dilemma tale type as a narrative style helps to understand that tradition or, legacy is a complex phenomenon for the African American to fathom.

The August Wilson Archive: First Panel Discussion (January 2021)

The Editor and Managing Editor of the August Wilson Journal met with four specialists from the University Library System (ULS) at the University of Pittsburgh and one University of Pittsburgh history professor via Zoom on January 14, 2021 to discuss the ULS’s recent acquisition of August Wilson’s archival materials.

Erratum to Saunders, Skyler. "Unlocked Minds: August Wilson’s Suspects, Ex-Cons, or Soon-to-Be Convicted Characters in his American Century Cycle." August Wilson Journal [Online], 2(2020): doi https://doi.org/10.5195/awj.2020.55

The article Saunders, Skyler. "Unlocked Minds: August Wilson’s Suspects, Ex-Cons, or Soon-to-Be Convicted Characters in his American Century Cycle." August Wilson Journal [Online], 2 (2020): https://doi.org.10.5195/awj.2020.55 contained several errors in the original publication. The original version has been updated to reflect the following changes: On page 1, the following sentence has been removed: “Black Lives Matter Foundation, Inc is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada, whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.” The Black Lives Matter group is not about individual rights but is run by Marxists. The error was introduced by the editorial board. On page 3, the following section has been removed: “As of this writing, Blacks make up about 2.3 million of the 6.8 million or about 34% of incarcerated individuals, according to the NAACP. Former president of this organization Benjamin Jealous said, “Our country has five percent of the world's people and 25 percent of the world's prisoners. Now, you can flip that a different way, a Black person today in this country is more likely to be incarcerated than a Black person in South Africa at the height of apartheid” (NAACP)”. There are in fact not 6.8 million incarcerated people in the US. There are actually 2.3 million people behind bars. The error was introduced by the author.

O jogo do patriarcado em Um limite entre nós

Resumo: O texto dramático pode admitir reflexões políticas variadas, acrescidas de intensidade, posto que o texto se materializa em performances. Neste artigo, trazemos uma crítica ao patriarcado fundamentada no feminismo negro, nos estudos de gênero e na interseccionalidade. A peça de teatro analisada é Um limite entre nós (em inglês, Fences), originalmente publicada em 1985, um texto pungente da literatura norte-americana criado pelo dramaturgo August Wilson (1945-2005). Na obra, o protagonista Troy encontra-se amarrado ao sistema racista americano, comportando-se conforme as regras rígidas do beisebol. No jogo, a esposa Rose tem pouquíssimas chances de vitória. Essa vida reduzida de Rose, apontada brilhantemente por Wilson, torna possível concebermos uma crítica à instituição da família e da sociedade capitalista ocidental sustentada no patriarcado.

La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Starting the Conversation

Beginning with a reading of Black cultural documentarian Roland L. Freeman’s poem “Don’t Forget the Blues” (1997), this chapter explores a pair of opposed slogans, “Blues is black music” and “No black. No white. Just the blues,” that together constitute the principal ideological conflict within contemporary blues culture. At a moment when blues music has been thoroughly globalized with the help of events like the annual International Blues Challenge in Memphis and when African American players and fans represent a greatly attenuated minority within that global cohort, who speaks for the blues? What role do the burdens of Black history, including slavery and segregation, which critically impacted the blues’ formation and development, play in this new global blues order? Seeking to honor the complexities and dialectical thrust of the blues as evoked by the line, “You can’t judge a book by looking at the cover,” the author asks readers to suspend their ideological reflexes and attend to the music’s paradoxes, even while using writings and interviews by August Wilson, B. B. King, and Honeyboy Edwards to illustrate the way in which the blues—as racial feeling, not just music—emerges from Black lives in the Deep South.

Stage Review of Fences

A stage review of Fences by August Wilson, staged by the Chattanooga Theatre Centre in Chattanooga, Tennessee from Friday, February 15 through Saturday, March 9, 2019.

Unlocked Minds: August Wilson’s Suspects, Ex-Cons, or Soon-to-Be Convicted Characters in his American Century Cycle

This essay is a meditation on the significant number of carceral references made by the late Mr. August Wilson in his American Century Cycle. It sets out to delineate the various instances where Mr. Wilson mentions the many associated pains, both mental and corporal, that crop up in lives of his characters, related to prisons, jail, work farms, chain gangs and other forms of detainment and imprisonment.