Legacies of Enslavement and Emancipation: American Slave Narratives and August Wilson’s Plays

Abstract

In a collection of ten plays, August Wilson has dramatized African-American life in each decade of the twentieth century. This paper argues that Wilson’s dramatic representation of slavery and its legacies is related not only to the historical experience of enslavement but also to antebellum African-American slave narratives. By juxtaposing the specific presentations of African-American history and culture in Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and The Piano Lesson with American slave narratives, we can see Wilson has constructed contemporary dramatic works that parallel these nineteenth-century texts and thus stand as present-day slave narratives. This essay will consider these three plays alongside three of the most widely read slave narratives in the United States: Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), James W.C. Pennington’s The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849), and Henry Bibb’s Narrative of the Life of Henry Bibb (1850). Formally, Wilson’s plays revisit some of the most characteristic elements of the classic slave narratives, including these narratives’ typical critiques of the slave system and their representation of “freedom.” Rhetorically, the goals of affirming the human and cultural value of African Americans through oral and physical, extra-linguistic expression are also comparable.