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The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson
Harry J. Elam, Jr.
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Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of Fences, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and The Piano Lesson, among other dramatic works, is one of the most well respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. The founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project is to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade.
Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam examines Wilson's published plays within the context of contemporary African American literature and in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, race and representation. Elam finds that each of Wilson's plays recaptures narratives lost, ignored, or avoided to create a new experience of the past that questions the historical categories of race and the meanings of blackness.
Harry J. Elam, Jr. is Professor of Drama at Stanford University and author of Taking It to the Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (The University of Michigan Press).
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Cover
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Title
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Copyright
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Acknowledgments
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Contents
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The Overture “To Disembark”
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Introduction (W)righting History: A Meditation in Four Beats
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Chapter 1 The Music Is the Message
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Chapter 2 Fools and Babes
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Chapter 3 The Woman Question
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Chapter 4 Men of August
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Chapter 5 Ogun in Pittsburgh: Resurrecting the Spirit
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Chapter 6 The Rhetoric of Resistance by Way of Conclusion
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The Doing and Undoing of History: An Epilogue
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Notes
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Selected Bibliography
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Index
Citable Link
Published: 2004
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- 978-0-472-11368-2 (hardcover)
- 978-0-472-03163-4 (paper)
- 978-0-472-02184-0 (ebook)