The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson

Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright August Wilson, author of
Fences ,
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , and
The Piano Lesson , among other dramatic works, was one of the most well-respected American playwrights on the contemporary stage. As the founder of the Black Horizon Theater Company, his self-defined dramatic project was to review twentieth-century African American history by creating a play for each decade. Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam, Jr. 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.