Category Archives: RESEARCH PAPER

Fredrick August Kittel: The Making of Playwright / Dr. Rashmi Batta

Fredrick August Kittel: The Making of Playwright

 

Dr. Rashmi Batta

Assistant Professor of English

Patel Memorial National College

Rajpura, Punjab

Fredrick August Kittel (August Wilson) was born on 27th April, 1945 in the Hill District off Pittsburg in Pennsylvania and was the fourth child of German father and African-American mother. Frank Rich, a New York Times critic in 1984 called August Wilson “major find for the American Theatre” (Frank Rich, qtd. in Pereira, August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey ix). Wilson’s mother’s name was Daisy Wilson, she was a cleaning woman and his father’s name was Fredrick Kittel. He was a baker by profession and was an autocratic. They lived in a black slum in Pittsburg in a small two room’s apartment in an environment of acute deprivation, a poor neighborhood inhabited by black Americans, Italians and Jews. During the late 1950s when Wilson was in his teen age, his mother married David Bedford and they moved to a predominantly white suburban neighborhood, Hazelwood. It was here that August Wilson had faced racial hostility. Bricks were thrown at their home. Not only had this, Wilson despite his intellectual gifts, experienced hard to believe humiliations in Catholic school in Pittsburg. Once in the school Wilson found a note on his bench telling: “Go home, Nigger” (Shannon, The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson 90). What more, his formal education virtually ended when in the white parochial school he himself wrote a paper on Napoleon but his history teacher who believed that a black could do so well accused him of plagiarism.

But the career of August Wilson did not end here. August Wilson was a name of courage, hope and passion. He had in him the desire to prove himself in his life, and to fight against these kinds of discriminations and with these missions he continued his studies Carnegie library in Oakland. He made excessive use of Carnegie library to educate himself and later he was awarded with a degree, the only one such black that they had bestowed. When he was twenty years old he had a dream of becoming a poet, and he became a part of talented group of poets such as Rob Penny and worked hard to earn the title of a ‘poet’. Black Bart was his first professional production. In his poems, he has dedicated himself to the services of the community. Some of his poems were published in Negro Digest, Black Lines, and The Poetry of Black Americans: An Anthology of the Twentieth Century. But unfortunately August Wilson was not much praised by his audience as a poet.  And in his later life, his interest shifted towards drama writing and he became a celebrating dramatist, a playwright. But never had he lost the impact of poetry on himself as a playwright. In an interview Wilson said:

It’s (poetry) the bedrock of my playwriting not so much in approach and the thinking. Thinking as a poet, one thinks differently as a playwright. The idea of metaphor is very large is my plays and something that I find lacking in my contemporary plays. I think I write the kind of plays that I do because I have 26 years of writing poetry underneath all of that (Wilson qtd. in Bryer, Conversation with August Wilson 119).

The life of August Wilson has always been shaped by number of factors. Like Black Power Movement and Civil Rights Movement have always influenced his life, because of which he got interested in the history of his community. Calling himself ‘A Black Nationalist’ August Wilson duly acknowledges the influences of the above given movements on his career. He says:

I discovered the Black Movement of 60’s. I felt it a duty and an honor to

participate in that historic movement. The Movement inspired us to alter

our relationships to the society in which we live – and perhaps more

important, to search for ways to alter the shared expectations of ourselves

as a community of people. The Black Power Movement … was a kin in

which I was fired and has much to do the person I am today (Wilson, qtd.

in Ghosh, “A Study of ‘The Piano Lesson’” 4).

As a playwright August Wilson was influenced by what he referred as “Four B’s” (Wilson, Fences 101). The first B was Blues, the second and the third were writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka. The fourth B was an artist Romare Bearden. August was a pure product of African culture, and his life was always inspired by the sufferings that the people of his community had gone through in their lives. Talking about the first B that is Blues, his indebt to blues can be easily acknowledged from the following statement made by Wilson himself. He says:

I think that what’s contained in the blues is the African-American’s response to the world. …the thing with blues is that there’s an entire philosophical system at work. And I’ve found that whatever you want to know about black experience in America is contained in the blues … It is our sacred book … Anything I want to know, I go there and find it out (Wilson qtd. in Rocha “August Wilson and Four B’s influences” 8).

It was Amiri Baraka who inspired Wilson to find out African-American forms of art and hence shaped the world view of August Wilson. Following the footsteps of Baraka Wilson projected his heroes against racism. Rocha writes:

Wilson’s obvious desire to ‘get over on’ the Western tradition is first and the foremost what bonds him so strongly to his brother poet Baraka, who is in quest for post-while, post-America, post-Western form is the discoverer, of African American literary landscape in which Wilson has found a place (Rocha, “August Wilson and Four B’s influences” 5).

From Baldwin, August Wilson learned how to create Black characters and also he learned respect for African tradition. To talk about his fourth inspiration, that is, Romare Bearden, he was a torch bearer for August Wilson through the forest of ignorance, confusion and turmoil. He “offered Wilson  a new visual language that created a world populated by conjure women, trains, guitar players, birds, masked figures, and rituals of baptisms, funerals, dinners, parades” (Rocha, “August Wilson and Four B’s influences”  11). Also August Wilson has acknowledged the influence of Bearden’s The Prevalence of Ritual:

I Looked. What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it; affirmed its value and exalted its presence … I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and never ceased to think of since (Wilson qtd. in Rocha, “August Wilson and Four B’s influences” 11).

The other influence on Wilson was of director Lloyd Richards. From Richards, he learnt the art of staging the plays. Wilson duly expressed the influence of Richards on him during the production of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. He said:

I discovered I didn’t know anything about casting, so Lloyd cast it. The first day of the rehearsal, the actors read the script and they had some question. Before I could get it together, Lloyd started answering the questions and he knew the answers. I found out that he knew the characters like I did. I was amazed at the answers he was giving. So I visibly relaxed from that moment. I realized, Pops knows what’s happening so I sat back and said ‘let Pops do it’ (Bryer, Conversation with August Wilson 86).

It was the greatness of August Wilson that he has publicly acknowledged his debt to four B’s. And taking inspiration from his poetry and four B’s, he developed into a leading playwright of 1980’s and 1990’s in America. August Wilson is such a playwright who has followed up the success story of The Tony Award winning Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984). For the best play, this play also won The New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1985 with his other prominent plays like Fences, winner of Pulitzer Prize for 1987, and also won Tony Award for the best play, The New York Drama Critics Circle Award again for the best play in 1987. His Joe Turner Come and Gone won the credit of the best play of the year and also The New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1988, and finally for The Piano Lesson he won the second Pulitzer Prize in 1990.

Wilson’s “Pittsburg cycle,” which is usually referred to as his “Century Cycle,” consists of ten plays – nine of which are situated in Pittsburgh’s Hill District on African-American neighbourhood. In these ten plays, August Wilson has portrayed the lives of African-Americans in each decade of the 20th century. In decade order the these plays are – 1900’s Gem of the Ocean (2003), 1910’s Joe Turner Come and Gone (1986), 1920’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), 1930’s The Piano Lesson (1987), 1940’s Seven Guitars (1996), 1950’s Fences (1983), 1960’s Two Trains Running (1992), 1970’s Jitney, 1980’s King Hedley II (2001), and 1990’s Radio Golf (2005). Hilary Devries quotes August Wilson who says: “I’m taking each decade and looking back at one of the most important questions that blacks confronted in that decade and writing play about it. Put them all together and you have a history” (DeVries, “The Drama of August Wilson” 12). Dr. G.R. Kataria in the praise of Wilson writes:

He has taken black history as a base and instead of the dull and factual recount of what happened in a particular decade, he has written it all in a lively and interesting manner in a style which is both dramatically charged and intellectually stimulating, on the theme of race relations, need for understanding, as also contribution of blacks to nation building. In his daunting venture he has had a collaborator in Lloyd Richards, who by sensitively handling four of his six plays, has helped him transcreate the magic of words in theatre and allowed them to recover their own personal histories by retelling stories they had heard in their childhood . . . The core of the plays shows them as seething with anger and frustration; stemming from rampant racial discrimination and social injustice. Collectively these plays constitutes Wilson’s overt literary intent . . . Wilson’s determination to verbalize the black experience after slavery has been abolished is thus a committed venture, unique and fascinating in itself (Kataria, “The Problematic of Responsibility” 32-33).

The cycle enabled Wilson to peruse his other goals, that is, to make African-Americans proud of their history, legacy and identity. This cycle of ten plays also enables Wilson to get his mission fulfilled: to make the blacks aware towards self-definition and self-determination. As mentioned earlier also his work as a playwright was to create a cultural history of blacks from the first decade of the 20th century to the last decade. The main problem which Wilson felt was that the blacks were facing was that the new generation was totally unaware of their roots, past history, legacy and true identity. He thought that the parents were to a certain extent responsible for not passing on the history to their children as they shielded them from their past experience and life. Wilson says:

My parents like so many, wanted to protect their children from the indignities which they had suffered. As an example, black women weren’t allowed to try on dresses in department stores. When blacks made purchases in any store, they weren’t given paper bags, instead they had to carry out their purchases without a bag. If my mother had informed us of these things, it might have lessened her authoritarian presence in the world or she might have come home one day to find me with hundred of paper bags that I have stolen from somewhere here’s your paper bag, Ma! There were various reasons why they kept these things to themselves. But she should have told me. If I had been more aware of these things I would have learned sooner just who I was and what my relationship to society was. American society as a whole has a very short memory. There are a lot of things, we don’t know or have allowed ourselves to forget. I was visiting a high school, Seward High School in 1987, and one of the students in the classrooms thought that slavery had ended in 1960. He was very serious about it, when some other students laughed he didn’t understand why. I thought it almost criminal that he was walking around in 1987 thinking this and that we blacks had not made sure that he knew better (Wilson,  Culled from: http://www.findarticles.com 2).

The present study will reflect upon Wilson’s attempt to make his people aware of their history, legacy and identity. Through his plays he has tried to recover the history of his community and reconstruct the identity of Africans-Americans. As they were slaves of the past, they have forgotten the sense of dignity and self-respect. The ingrained taboos of slavery made them live at the bottom of life and in the sub-human conditions. So, for Wilson it had become an important project to make them realize of their unique identity. In his plays Wilson tries to reconstruct the blacks identity and self.

Jitney is first produced at Allegheny Repertory Theatre, Pittsburg, P.A. in 1982. This play is written in and about the late 1970s in Pittsburg Hill District. This is the first play by Wilson in which he has presented everyday life of blacks in America and the difficulties they have gone through for their survival.

            Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982), set in the 1920’s centers on a lively jazz singer and her group who decided whether to peruse their art or cave into the commercial considerations. The play establishes Wilson’s theme of the African-American response to the demands of assimilation which erodes black identity and corrupts the individuals talent:

Ma Rainey sends the entire history of Black Americans crashing down upon our heads… a searching inside account of what white racism does to its victims and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates (Isherwood “August Wilson, Theatre’s Poet of Black America”).

            Fences (1983) is a play that set in 1957, just before the Civil Right Movement, first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1985; produced on broad way at 46th Street Theatre, March 1987. The play shows various generations of the blacks subjected to racial discrimination and shows how blacks choose assimilation rather than authenticity. It is a story of black family trying to come to terms with the racial discrimination, poverty and a strong will to find out the bad situation and to find a place for themselves in the society. In this play bitter experience of racist past clashes with the awakening hope of future.

Joe Turner Come and Gone is first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1986; and produced on Broadway at Barrymore Theatre, March 1988. The play is set in a turn-of-the-century in 1911 is about the incarceration and torture that the blacks suffered as bondage laborers. The play is one of a series that explores African-American life decade by decade. In this Herald Loomis turns up, claiming he has escaped from forced labor, only to find that his wife is now a religious fanatic. The plot of the play is less important than Wilson’s provocative effort to render the feel of African-American life and the conflicts, and the confused searches engendered in a world marked by persecution. Marry L. Bogumil writes:

The subject of displacement in all its psychological vicissitudes is dramatized in August Wilson’s Joe Turner Come and Gone, a play in which African American residence of a boarding house in Pittsburg Pennsylvania in 1911 attempt to rediscover, repossess, and redefine themselves historically and socially as free citizens (Bogumil, “Tomorrow Never Comes” 463).

The Piano Lesson, first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1987; produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre, 1990. The play focuses on the five generation of the blacks. The play is set in 1930s in Pittsburg and focuses on a dispute among African-Americans about an heirloom/legacy piano. It explores connections between blacks and their past. Memories of racial past of older generation clash with the hope of bright future of the new generation. The play which had been written in 1986 and was previously presented at O’Neill and Yale Repertory Theatres in Connecticut, is the first drama ever to win a Pulitzer Prize before opening in New York

            Two Trains Running (1992) is first produced at Yale Repertory Theatre, 1991 and is produced on Broadway at Walter Kerr Theatre in 1992. This play reflects “the complex social tapestry-surrounding African Americans at the end of the 60’s” (Pereira, August Wilson and The African-American Odyssey 7).

His next play Seven Guitars (1996) is first produced in 1996.Wilson in this play continues his chronicle of African American life, focusing on Blues musician Floyd “schoolboy” Barton, his musical collogues, and their neighbors in Pittsburg in 1948. In a way this play is a tribute to a guitarist who confirms the belief that Africa is in you.    

Radio Golf (2005) is premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005. This play is the final in Wilson’s cycle of ten plays that examines the African-American experience in the 20th century in America. Each play takes a decade and Radio Golf is the final play covering the 1990s

 

The history of black immigration into the United States dates back to the sixteen century where the blacks were forcibly uprooted from their African homeland ,transported in atrocious conditions across the Atlantic. On the way to the Ellis Island, New York, they suffered, starved ,cursed and were abused and kicked by their new white masters. They did not understand what the white man spoke but they knew they were at his mercy. Eventually they learnt to use his language, adopted his (Christian)  religion ,and began calling themselves by Anglo-Saxon names . They adopted the white man’s foods, dresses, mannerisms and literally made themselves extensions of their masters life. The supremacy of the white master went unquestioned and blacks called Nigger and Negro became his chattels which the former could barter lived in the outhouses of the antebellum plantations , quietly suffering denial, derision and falsification of their artistic talents. They were so far away from their homelands  that they could not think of returning or escaping. They had  to make the best of the bad bargain by accepting the white man as their master, doing his bidding, not only for existence but also for survival These Negroes (the black) were uneducated and had no culture to boast of. Their numbers was small and were purchased as slaves. The white landlords treated them badly and had rights to exploit them in miserable way. This status was not more than a heat of burdon. However, in the beginning of 19th century, some white owners treated Negroes well in North American states, where as in Southern states their condition was inhuman and deplorable.

Right from the days of slavery, the blacks, irrespective of sex have realized the cruel reality of racism. Blacks on a group were relegated to a class of underdogs by virtue of their race making them realize that their color and physiognomy were terrible handicaps, and as such would mark evil. Universal codes of social and psychological praxis as laid down by the dominant while culture were forcibly thrust upon them. Racism was aridly practiced in America which had worst impact on African-Americans. Racism, as a man-made phenomenon, may be defined according to Hornitos as “all of the learned behavior and learned emotions on the part of a group of people towards another group whose physical characteristics are dissimilar to the forms group; behavior and emotions that compel one group to…. treat the other on the basis of its physical characteristics alone, as if it did not belong to the human race.” (Hernton, 175) The basic myth of racism, in other words, in that white shin brings with its cultural superiority, in that the white are more intelligent and more virtuous than the black by the more fact of being white. On the psychological level, whiteness is automatically equated with beauty and culture and blackness with ugliness and slavery.

Unable to read or write English and fore bidden by law in most states to learn, these Negroes started to cultivate their natural fascination. Racism started in America when white masters of the land brought the first African in chains and used their labor to enrich their coffers. As a result, black people soon ceased to exist as human beings in the white world. “The first reduced the human self of his black slave to a body and then the body to a thing; he dehumanized his slaves, made him quantifiable, and thereby absorbed him into a rising world marked of productive exchange.’’( Kovel, 18) All that was left to blacks was their African soul which was also taken away by imposing white values on them. With the breakdown of their native values, they lost their authentic self and almost invariably acquired feelings of inferiority. The white created the institutions in which blacks were finally ready to live by. This convert form of racism “was doubly injuries to the blacks race in that not much notice was taken of its invisibly corrosive nature.” (Plakkoottam, 13) Such was the first step towards the establishment of racism as an inseparable part of the white American Civilization.

For a long time the curse of racial discrimination continued to occupy the control position among other social issues. A sense of inferiority and inadequacy was being fostered by the white dominant group to deprive blacks of their genuine potential. There always existed a color line which assumed white privilege in form of unobstructed access to the resources and pleasures of public space, while providing harsh sanctions against those on the other side of the line. Therefore, color line continued to be named as personal distinction of race. As kawash observes:

In the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the  color line was a palpable, physical boundary of separation. With a fine enough lens, one could map out the separate zones of blackness and whiteness within the nation’s border: black in the back of the bus, white in front: black schools and white schools; black towns, parks, restaurants, and neighborhood, each with its (usually much nicer) white counterpart.  (Kawash,1) Thus began the oppressive stay of racism in America. It brought with it pain, sorrow, bloodshed, death and above all, the negation of an entire race. The African-American race was in addition ghettoized, ill treated and violently forbidden from avenues of decency, hope, progress and livelihood. In the racial distinction between black and white, the idea of race was inseparable from the idea of slavery. The humiliation of Africans and African-Americans was a function, not simply of racial prejudice, but also of the institution of slavery as a system of property relations and definition. White could never be a slave, while black could not be a master. Under slavery, the color line was always a property line. Black was presumed to be slave, property of another, while white was presumed to be person, holder of property in the self. The legal status of the slave was reduced to a person who did not own the self and therefore had no rights. Their blackness itself became a sign of the absence of self-possession. The whites were god-fearing people. So even as some of them were cruel to the blacks and punished him severely for minor lapses, there were others who came to depend on him and gave him sufficient to eat and live in the out-houses with peace. The white taught him to cultivate in the cotton plantations, work in his factories and do all add jobs. The black women cooked, washed, did baby-sitting and whatever else the white man and his family asked them to do. The particular myth re-narrated by Henry Louis Gates while, on the one hand explained why blacks were ignorant, and on the other, accorded divine sanction to slavery through mythology, thus freeing the conscientious white from all guilt.

.For almost two centuries these blacks who lacked literacy or legal sanction to rise in revolt lived in perpetual fear of the white man . Even as they lived on the cutting edge of poverty, misery and exploitation, they got together after working hours to knit yarns about “home’’, tell tales with striking images and metaphors. They created their own simple songs, their own crude musical instruments and gave birth to what scholars today designate as “blues” (their songs). With stories and music put together “ oral literature” so characteristics of blacks was born. It comprised folk tales and soulful songs as expressions of  the black experience in America and their own humanity. The oral tradition has been the hall-mark of the black literary output as it has been passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth, giving all the tale-tellers an opportunity to weave into the received material all that they would wish to add. While the oral literature has  been  counted as a strength of the blacks and their literature, whites have dubbed it as their weakness- a weakness arising from the black’s general shyness o write and verbalize their feelings in a written form. While some of the slaves, especially on the south , suffered  at the hands of their white masters in the North however the condition was not so deperable. Some of the compassionate white masters trained the blacks along with their own children. Phillis Wheatley, credited with being the first African-American poetess, was probably the result of such compassion itself. It must, however be conceded that such concessions were rare and a majority of the blacks were ignorant, uneducated and strongly discriminated against.

In order to establish themselves in the land they had inhabited for more than two hundred years blacks started showing a searing anger at their invisibility, denial of identity, facelessness and namelessness. Amiri Baraka, on agit-prop playwright of 1960s felt that “blackness was not a stigma that a black man was born with but the spur, the barb on the shirt of pain that moved the artist to achieve distinction” (Davis. 3) Departing from W.E.B Du Bois’ conciliatory tone Barka (then Lerai Jones) wrote, “We must make our own world, man our own world and we cannot do this unless the white man is dead. Let’s get together and kill him any man, let’s get together the first of the sun. Let’s make a world we want black children to grow and learn in… nor let your children when they grow look in your face and curse you by pitying your to mish ways. (Harries 224). Following the revolutionaries the artists and intellectuals found new ways to explore the historical experiences of black American and the Contemporary experience of black life in the urban north. They rejected merely imitating the styles of white American and instead celebrated black dignity and creativity. As blacks wanted to express themselves freely, they explored their identities as black Americans. They celebrated their black culture which emerged out of slavery and their cultured ties to Africa. By the passes of time, the Negroes came in contact with Christianity and gradually adopted the white man’s culture and their ethnic superiority. They adopted Christian names and white men’s food and habits. But still, white men discriminated against them. They were considered inferior, idle and lazy. They were not treated as citizens of the U.S.A and enjoyed no rights. However, the condition of the black was no letter in the North American states .Bold and compassionate American President Abraham Lincoln was against slavery. So for five years the Northern American states and South American states fought a civil war. President Abraham Lincoln won and slaver was abolish in the U.S.A in 1863. The blacks fought in the war and its conclusion saw emancipation for the slaves of the North, in the south only there were escapes reported of the ex-slaves from the plantations. The black moles now wandered freely but only after deserting their families in the white man’s out houses. However, white racism did not bring relief to American Southern states. The African-American were employed for dirty jobs and were forced to study in Black Schools.

Immediately after the end of slavery the liberated Afro-Americans began to struggle for civic participation, political equality, economic and cultural self-determination. There were many social and intellectual transformations in the African-American community that had taken place since the late nineteenth century. These changes in black community since the abolition of slavery paved way for the Harlem Renaissance. Although the term “Harlem” (a black locality in New York) in “Harlem Renaissance” it refers to an era of written and artistic creativity among African-American that occurred other World war I and lasted until the middle of the 1930s depression. It is not that there were not black written during the civil war on before. But the efflorescence started in the second decade of the 20th century. Actually, with the down of the twentieth century things improved gradually. African American people writers Frederick Dougals and Booker T. Washington, the two great political leaders, began movement to liberate the Black-Americans from the dominance of white racist culture with the arrival of W.E.B. Du. Bois black politics, however, got a new tone and tenor. He started a movement for organizing African-American people to shed off their inferiority and assert their pride and equality. The movement soon developed into Harlem Renaissance (1915-1945) and National Association for the Advancement of Colored people. It brought to fare American Black writers, novelists, historians, commentators and dramatis. In fact, “Harlem Renaissance” was misleading because most of the prominent black writers of the period, like Claude Mckay and Langston Hughes lived elsewhere during most of the 1920’s, the peak period of the literary movement.

Harlem Renaissance, however, has been hailed as the glorious period of black writing when blacks wrote novels, poems, dramas, autobiographies, commentaries, reminiscences, histories and analyses. The famous writers of this period, apart from the new mentioned above included the novelist James Weldon Johnson, the dramatists Garland Anerson and Wallace Thurman and poet like counties Cullen and Jean Toomer. Harlem soon became the Negro’s Mecca with artists, actors, poets, dramatists, social scientists all getting together. A major factor leading to the rise of Harlem Renaissance was the migration of African-American to the Northern Cities Earlier it was first known as the ‘ New Negro Movement’ but later known as Harlem Renaissance. This movement brought exceptional creative activity in writing, art, and music and refined expressions of Africans and their heritage. Later, this movement helped to lay the foundation of the Civil Right Movement.

The Civil Rights Movement had tremendous impact on American life and it history. This movement produced, among other things, many black national leaders. They all practically agreed on a common cause of freedom, justice and equality and the pursuit of happiness. One of the most prominent and influential black leaders of the twentieth century, William Educated Burghar dt Dubois, founded the Niagara Movement and five years later, became one of the prominent leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of colored People (NAACP). Dubois advocated and genuinely be lived in what modern sociologists called ‘Cultural pluralism.’ Rejecting the concept of melting pot, he realized that complete amalgamation of the races in America probably would never occur. He insisted, however, that blacks wanted to be both black and American maintaining their racial identity and integrity while associating in American Culture to the fullest extent. As early as 1897, Dubois had written that “One feels [the Negro’s] two-ness – an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two worrying ideals in the dark body. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro end an American without being cursed and spit upon.” (Gates, Figures in Black 6) His aim was to integrate the black into a free ‘truly democratic’ society, and he did not default that it would come. Dubois’s later ideas and theories were built on his belief in the power of knowledge. He believed in the ‘educative’ force of culture which was capable of bringing about changes, and in the establishment of intellectual elite in possession of this culture which would lead the masses.

Along with racial distinction, blacks had to face many problems. They were viewed with a sense of shame and outrage at their inability to read and write. So, there arose a reaction leading to the urgent need to disapprove and refute the racist charge that black race shirked reading and writing. “It would, therefore, not be wrong to hazard a generalized statement that blacks evolved a literary tradition not merely out of a desire to create and reach out but also to vindicate their race that it could learn and play with words like any white writes could.” (Kataria 99). Through their writings, they had to prove a point. It was an act of self-assertion, an act to declare themselves human, no less than the others. This was the logical reason for the evolution of black consciousness which arose from the sense of superiority that white critics arrogated to themselves. “Blacks had been second-rated, denigrated, discriminated against and oppressed, they have had enough reason to look for a separate identity, political and cultural which would make them come out of their ignominious existence, and give them the much needed affirmation.”(Kataria 104)

From the beginning, black writers have produced a literature of social protest and human enlightenment. Black writing was always under siege during the two hundred and fifty years of slavery, it was the legal crime for blacks to read and write. By Virtue of its origin, nature and function, black writing is thus ‘mission consciousness’ and is necessarily a dangerous undertaking. There arose a demand for the black writers who could write black literature which constituted black culture and black life.”A dilemma that a black writer faced when beginning to write was, who is his audience, the patronizing whites or the blacks like him those living the life of ignominy and  misery.” (Kataria 100) The Black writers faced the major problem to express themselves truly. This confused the black writer as he would be rejected by the educated elite if he wrote the truth and would not be true to himself and his experience if he compromised with his writing. Therefore, writers started making conscious attempts to go to the roots re-link the present with the past. The blacks used their literary power to vindicate themselves from the white oppression. Their literature appeared on the world scene as a protest literature. In this refrain Lorry Neal wrote, “Protest literature assumes that the people we are talking to do not understand the literature is finally a plea to write American for our human dignity. We cannot get it that way. We must address each other. We must touch each other beauty, wonder and pain.”  (Neal 272) Now, the time had come for the blacks to show pride in separate identity for themselves.

Women writers took up as their founder duty to discover black women’s self entrapment in the white society. The urge to discover one’s self women writers. About this Alexis De Veau Says: “I see a greater commitment among black women writers to understand self multiplied in terms of the world.”  (Veau, Black Women writers 55) subjected to severe brutality of racism, classism and sexism by the white patriarchal society; the black woman was tormented in all respects, key and description. They had to fight for their economic survival and against ethnic and racial discrimination. Possibly no other social group has been subjected to such an uncivilized vision of human disgrace and depravity. Being black, the African women suffered from racism; being females, they were the victims of sexual atrocities at the hands of the white patriarchs as well as the blacks. Being former slaves, the white establishment forced them to live on meager resources and were compelled to remain poor. In short, the black women in America were made victims of triple jeopardy – racism, sexism, and classism. There was a shift in the condition of blacks. “The shift was largely because the blacks began to sense increasingly that the discrimination was ebbing away, that their presence in restaurant, courts, army, police and sports was no longer a taboo. Their economic condition was improving, political presence and power was increasing. The school syllabi began to include works by African-American authors and full-fledged courses begun to offered in universities an African-American writing. In addition, blacks came to be addressed more respectfully with a hyphen like to other Americans who traced their ancestry elsewhere, as Afro-Americans and more recently as African-Americans,” .( Kataria 18).

The black writings became an art that sought to express the beauty, artistic capabilities and life styles of its black participants. Finally, the black literature was to be used to achieve physical, spiritual, psychological and cultural liberation of the black people.  The three major works which are considered and analyzed in the present study are The Blue Eye written by Toni Marrison, The Color Purple written by Alice Walker and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom written by August Wilson. All these three works illustrate has color matters in terms of forcing hierarch zed identities across the black Diaspora. These three texts examine the value of lightness over darkness in the black community. The protagonists of these works express their own identity by valuing their blackness in the white world. They do not limit themselves because of their blackness instead their blackness becomes a metaphor and helps them to curve their identity in the society. Unlike the past when blacks were not heard, today they are recognized in all fields and genres. Toni Morrison, one of the major literary figures in contemporary American fiction was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature on October 7, 1993. She is the first Black American woman to win the literature prize and eighth women to win it. The Swedish Academy specially praised her for giving life to an essential aspect of American reality in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import. Morrison preoccupation with race matters in natural, given the background in which she grew up. She was born in 1931 as chole Anthony Wofford, the second of the four children in Lorain, a small town in Northern Ohio. Morrison went to school in Lorian. She was the only black child in her first grade class and also the only one who could read. She was on heir to the family history of loss, dispossession and racial discrimination on both the sides paternal and maternal. Morrisan was brought up in a basically raciest household, where both her grand parents and also her parents were a politically conscious people. They inducted into her their contempt for white people. She was thought that ‘resistance, excellence and integrity, were very much a part of their rich African post. Morrisan graduated from Howard and took her masters in English literature from Cornell. It was white working as text line book editor for Random House in Syracuse that she began writing fiction.

Morrisan presents the trauma of black life in her works. She universalizes oppression – where blacks torment blacks, whites oppress blacks, women are against women, parents torture their children, etc. The picture of black life, that emerges from her novels, is indeed harrowing – Toni Morrison, in her novels, has explored various possibilities for Afro-Americans. The central motif of her work in the role of race in American life. The major issues, she addresses include racial discrimination, victimization of the blacks, the emotional and psychological problems faced by Afro-Americans in trying to achieve a sense of white cultural codes. Toni Morrison’s novels stress the need for self-discovery and self-identity leading to self-actualization. Morrison, being conscious of the dilemmas of the black people, her novels reflect the tension between the protest and transcendence; between suffering and strength, and between collective and individual identity. What is important in Morison’s novels is that, the sought privileges are not only denied to the adult blacks but the sense of helplessness experienced by those who have even reached their teens. In 1964, after her divorce, Morrison moved back to New York and began working as an editor for Random House. Here, she published many black, especially female writers such as Toni Code Bambara and Gayle Jones. She published autobiography of Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali. She also edited The Black Book, a scrap book of 300 years of black American life. The Bluest Eye, 1970, brought Morrison many respectful reviews. Her first navel deals with the psychological and emotional conflicts experienced by a black American girl as she constantly judges herself by the standards set by the white cultural norms. Her second novel, Sula, published in 1973 gained her national recognition. Sula carries the theme of dual oppression still further. In their efforts to run after and adapt the value system of the whites, the blacks suffer intolerable  psychological trauma. Song of Solomon, 1977 became the best seller and paved a path for its author’s into the list of noted contemporary novelists. It became the second black novel since Richard Wright’s Native Son to become a book-of-the month club selection. It also won the national book Critics  Circle Award. Contemporary life has been delineated in the Tor Baby. It was published in 1981 and was the recipient of the Bookers Award. The novel denounces the possibilities of the white and black cultural amalgamation. Her fifth novel Beloved, 1987 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. In this novel Morrison again turns back to the history of slavery and delineates the psychological and emotional effects of slavery. Her sixth novel, Jazz, published in 1992, catapulted her to the Nobel Prize fame.

Morrison’s first novel, The Blue Eye, probes deeper into black woman’s psychic dilemmas, oppression and tribulations symbolized by the tragic life of Pecola literally affected by the dominant culture’s beauty standards. It speaks about “a little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” (Morrison The Bluest Eye 137)  Pecola believes that ‘blue eyes’; the symbol of white beauty, would make her beautiful, acceptable and desirable. However, it could not be so in reality. So, she is disgruntled about her beauty. Disgust drags her to the corridors of madness. Pecola encounters racial violence black men. She faces humiliation and pain when her own father rapes her. All she has learnt about herself from school from her friends and the world around is that she is black, poor and ugly. Trapped is a world of taunts and threats. Pecola craves for love, but there is none to convince or re-assure Pecola of her worth. Pinning for love and admiration but finding it nowhere, she gradually lapses into the world of fantasy and fancies that she has the bluest eye in the world. She converses with her ‘other’ self and feels that blue eyes will solve all her problems of being ugly and black. Her alienation is complete when she withdraws into her own neurotic and insane world. The desire for blue eyes is an evidence of Pecola’s frustrations with her racial identity, with her social milieu and of her longing for an authentic selfhood. The Bluest Eye vividly portrays the woes of a black girl loathed by her family and society.

As such, this novel is a book about the mythic, political and cultural mutilation as much as it is a book about race and sex hatred. By exploring the devastating effects that the western ideas of beauty and romantic love have on a vulnerable black girl. Morrison also demonstrates, how these ideas can invert the natural order of an entire culture. Morrison is greatly concerned about the cultural devastation and its repercussion on the future of her country. The Bluest Eye reveals the futile effort on the part of Agro-Americans to exorcize what the divided psyche often holds as the evil of blackness. Recognized as one of leading voices among black American woman writers, Alice Walker has produced on acclaimed and varied body of work, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and criticism. Alice Walker has climbed the proverbial ladder of success to become one of America’s most gifted and influential writers. Although her work is diverse in subject matter and varied in form, it is clearly centered  on the struggles and spiritual development affecting the survival whole of women. Her writings portary  the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and reverting portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexiest and racist society.

Walker was born Eatonton, Georgia, where she learned early the values of looking within the hidden spaces of human experience and exploring them creatively. At the age of eight, a B B gun accident blinded and scarred her right eye. The experience of this disfigurement profoundly influenced walker’s life, leading her into a self-imposed isolation that was open only to her thirst for reading and her love of poetry. Walker used her blinded eye as a filter through which to look beyond the surface of African-American women’s existence, and discovered that she cared about both the pain and spiritual decay she found hidden there. Walker graduated from high school as valedictorian of her class and in 1961, entered Spelman College on a Georgia rehabilitation Scholarship. After a two years stay at Spelman and while a student at Sarah Lawrence College (1966-1965), Walker visited Africa for a summer. There she fell in love and wrote several of the poems that were later included in her first book of poetry, once (1968). Walker began her first published short story, To Hell with Dying in 1967, this is a tale of an old man who is survived from death by the attentive love of two children. It was later published as children’s book in 1988.

The ten years of Walker’s marriage were the most prolific in her creative career. In addition to the publication of her second book of poetry, titled Five Poems (1972), Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), joining Toni Morrisan in beginning what was to become known as a renaissance of African-American women writers. Unlike The Third Eye of Grange Copeland, Walker’s second novel, Meridian (1976), focuses on the Civil Rights Movement and its fight for social change. Meridian re-defines African-American motherhood and reconstructs it as an inner spark that fuels a genuine sense of love and responsibility among people; it does not generate from within the womb, but from within the relationship developed by black women that support and build their communities and their world. In 1979, Walker edited I love Myself when I am Laughing. The stories this anthology contains were collected by Walker after working continuously to restore the memory of Zora Neale Hurston to the annal of history. Walker is innovative in her attempts to save African-American women writers from the dark recess of oblivion. As a co-owner of her publishing house Wild Tree Press, Walker promoted and mentored new writers such as J. California Cooper. In 1977, while teaching at Wellesley College, She introduced academia to one of the best African-American’s literature courses. Walker’s pattern of challenging the minds and morals of her readers continued into the 1980s.  In 1982, she stepped across the line of a highly forbidden taboo with her portrayal of Celie in The Color Purple. It is her most famous work, the award winning and best-selling novel which chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker achieved the stats of a major American writer when the novel won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book award in 1983. Two years later, it was adopted as a major motion picture directed by Steven Spielberg.

Walker has described herself as a ‘womanish’ – her term for a black feminist, which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays, entitled In search of Our Mother’s Gardens in 1983. This book is a memories of Walker’s experiences and observations in African-American women’s culture and continues her exploration of the hidden truths defining female wholeness. Walker’s concern for spiritual wholeness and cultural connectedness completely ascended the physical in her fourth novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989). The reception of this novel was mixed and it did not receive the broad popularity of The Color Purple. The Temple of my Familiar reveals Walker’s belief that the roots of African-American woman’s hope for spiritual wholeness lies within the soil of their African Origins. But for Walker, even these origins are not above criticism and evaluation.

In her fifth novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) brings the life and imagination of Tashi, a character who appeared in both The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar, into full view. In 1998, she published her sixth novel, By the Light of My Father’s Smile, which examines native people’s spiritual traditions in Mexico and the import they have upon a visiting missionary African American family. The novel explores extra natural as well as beyond death experiences. Alice Walker is one of the first African-American women writes to explore the paralyzing effects of being a women in the world that virtually ignores issues like black-on-black oppression. Her efforts, however, have not always received favorable reception among blacks. In 1996, Walker published The Same River Twice, a book in which she addresses the pain of negatives criticism. Today, Walker continues to express creatively her wish for wholeness for those who have been erased from history torn from thus racial heritage, silenced, mutilated, and denied freedom. With incomparable of African-Americans only to weave them into a quilt of compassion that she spreads before the world-full, rich and flowing.

 

Bibliography

 Abbotson, Susan C.W. “From Jug Band to Dixieland: The Musical Development behind August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Modern Drama. Vol. 24, no. 4, Dec.2001, pp.100- 08.

Adell, S. “Speaking of Ma Rainey talking about the Blues.” Modern American Drama. Cambridge UP, 1994, pp. 51-66.

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. Verso, 1992.

Appiah, Anthony K. “Is the Post in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial.” Critical Reviews. Vol.8, no.2, Jan.2009, pp. 21-109.

Ashcroft, Bill. et al. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. Routledge, 1989.

Austin, A. “The Present State of Black Theatre.” Drama Review, vol.32, no.3, pp. 85-100, 1988. Austin, Addell. “The Present State of Black Theatre.” Drama Review, vol.32, no. 3, Fall 1988.

pp.85-100.

Baker, Houston A. Blues, Ideology and Afro–American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago UP, 1984.

Baraka, Amiri. “The Leroi Jones Amiri Baraka Reader.” Black Writers of America: A Comprehensive Anthology. Macmillian,1972.

Barnes, Clive. “American Place Stages ‘Electronic Nigger’.” Rev. of Electronics Nigger. New York Times, 1962.

Barnes, Clive. “Ma Rainey: The Black Experience.” The New York Post, vol.5, no. 3, Jan.1984. pp.85-100.

Bass, George Houston. “Theatre and Afro- American Rite of Being.” Black American Literature Forum, vol.9, no. 1, Fall 1998. pp.64-89.

Batta, Ajoy. August Wilson and The African–American Theatre. Thematic Publications, 2015. Best, Steven. “Jameson, Totality and the Poststructuralist Critique.” Postmodernism.

Maisonneuve, 1989, pp.364.

Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. Routledge, 1990.

—. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.

Bissiri, Amadou. “Aspects of Africans in August Wilson’s Drama: Reading The Piano Lesson through Wole Soyinka’s Drama.” African American Review, vol.30, no.1, spring,1996, Indian SUP, pp.99-113.

Blumenthal, Anna S. “More Stories Then the Devil Got Sinners: Troy’s Stories in August Wilson’s Fences.” American Drama, Oxford UP, pp.74-96.

Boan, Devon. “Call and Response: Parallel ‘Slave Narrative’ in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson.African American Review, vol.32, no.1, 1998, pp. 263-71.

Bogumil, Mary L. “Tomorrow Never Comes: Songs of Cultural Identity in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” Theatre Journal.vol.46, No. 4, 1994, pp. 463-76.

Brustein, Robert. “Only the Ball was White: A History of Legendary Black Players and All Black Professional Teams. Oxford UP, 1992.

Brustein, Robert. The Lesson of The Piano Lesson. Penguin. 1990.

Bryer, Jackson R., and Mary C. Hatig. Conversation with August Wilson. Mississippi UP, 2006. Bulmer, Martin. Racism. Oxford UP, 1999.

Byerman, Keith. Fingering the jagged Grain: Tradition and Farm in Recent Black Fiction. University of Georgia, 1985.

Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960’s. Harvard UP, 2005.

Chakraborty, Dipesh. “Post Coloniality and the Artifice of History: Who speaks for ‘Indian’ Posts?”, Representations,1992, pp.1-10.

 

 

Christianson, Richard. “August Wilson: A Powerful Playwright Probes the Meaning of Black Life.” Chicago Tribune,5 February 1988, section 13, pp.12-13.

Clark, K. “Race, Ritual, Reconnection, Reclamation: August Wilson and the prefiguration of the Male Dramatic Subject,” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: August Wilson, InfoBase Publishing, 2009, pp. 43-76.

Clintock, Anne Me. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term “Post colonialism.” Postcolonialism. Oxford UP,2004.

Cook, William W. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: Traditions of Afro-American Satire.”

Journal of Ethnicity, vol. 13, no.1, 1985.

Craft, David. The Negro Leagues:40 Years of Black Professional Baseball in Words and Pictures.Cresent,1993.

Crawford, Eilen. The Invisibility of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. August Wilson. Garland Publishing, 1994.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Culture and Politics. Random, 1989.

Davis, Charles T. Black is the Color of the Cousins: Essays on Afro- American Literature and Culture 1942-1981.Howard, 1989.

Derman, Louise. Teaching Learning Anti-Racism: A Development Approach. Teachers College Press, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other or the Prothesis of Origin. Trans. Patrick Mensah. Stratford UP, 1988.

Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” The American Review, vol.33, no.1.,1985. pp.331-32.

Dorson, Richard M. American Negro Folktales. New York Press.1967.

During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Post –Colonialism Today,” in Postmodern Conditions, Andrew Milner, Philip Thompson and Chris Worth, New York Press, 1990, pp.113-31.

Jerord, “The Role of Sylvester Brown in acting.” Diss. Alabama University May, 2005. Elam, Harry J. The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Eliot, T.S. Towards Definition of Culture. Harcourt, 1949.

Ellison, Ralph. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. Harper and Row,1988.

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Tr. Constance Farringdon. New York Press, 1963. Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities and Future Reparations. Routledge, 2001.

Ferrara, Alessan. Reflective Ethnicity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity. Routledge, 1998. Fishman, Joan “Developing His Song; August Wilson’s Fences’’ August Wilson: A Casebook. Ed. Marilyn Elkins. New York Press, 1994. pp.74-88.

Freedom, Samuel G. “A Voice from the Streets: August Wilson’s Plays Portray the Sound and Feel of Black Poverty”, New York Times Magazine, March 1987, pp.36-50.

Gallaway, Mark. “A Look Black at Negro Baseball,” Tribune Review, August 1993, pp.8-29. Gantt, Patrica. “Ghosts From ‘Down There’: The Southernism of August Wilson.” August

Wilson: A Casebook. Ed. Marilyn Elkins. Garland Publishing Inc, 1994.

Garent, Henry H. “A Memorial Discourse Delivered in the Hall House of Responsibilities, February 12, 1865, Washington City, D.C. with an Introduction by James Mccune Smith, M.D.” <www. Archive.org/ stream/…/memorial discourse oogarn-djvu.txt>.

Ghosh, N.K. “A Study of ‘The Piano Lesson.” Contemporary Diasporic Writings. Punjabi UP, 2007, pp. 01-30.

Glover, Margaret E. “Two Notes on August Wilson: The Songs of a Marek Man.’’ Theatre, 1986, pp. 69-70.

Golomb, Jacob. In Search of Authenticity: Existentialism from Kierkegaard to Camus. Routledge, 1995.

Grant, Nathan L. “Men, Women and Culture: A Conversation with August Wilson. “American Drama, vol. 5, no. 2, Spring, 1996, pp.100-122.

Grant, Robert B. The Black Man Comes to the City: A documentary Account from the Great Migration to the Great Depression,1915 to 1930. Nelson – Hall, 1972.

Hampton, Gregory J. “Black Men Fenced in and a Plausible Black Masculinity.” CLA Journal, vol. 46 no. 2, 2002, pp.194-206.

Hanlon, John J. “Niggers Got a Right to be Dissatisfied: Postmodernism, Race and Class in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Modern Drama, vol.45, no.1, Spring, 2002, pp.95-124.

Hansberry, Lorraine. “The Collected Last Plays.” New American Library, 1988.

Harries, Trudier. “August Wilson’s Folk Tradition.” August Wilson: A Casebook. Garland Publishing, 1994, pp.49-67.

Harrison Daphne, Dural. Blues Queens of the 1920’s. Ruther UP, 1980.

Harrison, Paul Cater. “August Wilson’s Blues Poetics.” August Wilsons: Three Plays. University of Pittsburgh Press,1991.

Haule, James M. “Setting the Worst on Fire: August Wilson and the Problem of Evil. Twentieth Century Literature, vol.28, no.4, Winter, 1982, Hofstra University, pp.453-466.

Hederson, Heather. “Building Fences: An Interview with Mary Alice and James Earl Joanes.” Theatre, New Haven, CT Theatre 1985 Summer –Fall, vol.6, no. 3, pp. 67-70.

Herrington, Joan. I Ain’t Sorry for Nothing Done: August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting. Lime Light Edition, 2004.

Hill, Holly. “Black Theatre into the Mainstream.” Contemporary American Drama. Ed. Bruce King. St. Martins,1991.

Holway, John. Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. Dodd Mead,1975.

Hooks, Bell. “Postmodern Blackness,” Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. South End Press, 1990.

Hoover, Bob, “Bedford Avenue to Broadway: Childhood in Hill Leads to a Pulitzer for August Wilson”. Pittsburgh Post- Gazette,1 June 1987, pp.15.

Hutcheon, Linda “Circling the Downspout of Empire.” American Reviews, 2001, pp.168-.228. Impane, J. “Filling the time: Reading History in the drama of August Wilson.” Bloom’s Period Studies Modern American Drama. Chelsea House Publishers, 2005, pp.173-90.

Isherwood, Charles. “August Wilson, Theatre’s Poet of Black’s America, is Dead at 60.” www.nytimes.com/2005/10/06/theatre.newsandfeatures/0.nulson.html.

Jameson, Fredric. Syntax of History. University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Jerad, E. The Role of Sylvester Brown in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom: Alabama UP, 2005.

Joane, Gorden. “Wilson and Fugard: Politics and Art.” August Wilson, A Casebook, ed., Marilyn Elkins, Garland Publishing, 1994, pp.17-29.

Johnson, Malcome. “Ma Rainey’s Visceral Attack on American Racism.” Hartford Courant.

Penguin, 1984.

Jone, LeRoi. The Revolutionary Theatre. Home: Social Essay. Morrow, 1966.

Jordan, Winthrop D. The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. Oxford UP, 1976.

Joshi, Svati. Rethinking English: Essays on Literature, Language. Penguin, 1991.

Kamara, G.M. “Regaining our Africans Aesthetics and Essence through our African Tradition Religion.” Journal of Black Studies, pp.30-50.

Kataria, G.R. “The Problematic of Responsibilities.” Fresh Insights into Contemporary American Literature. Creative Books, 2005.

Kawash, Samira. “Conditions: Hybridity and the Color Line.”  Dislocating the  Color Line: Hybridity and Singularity in African American Narrative. Oxford UP.1997, pp.1-19.

Keller, James R. “The Shaman’s Apprentice: Ecstasy and Economy in Wilson’s Joe Turner.” African American Review,1998pp. 471-479.

Kovel, Joel. White Racism: A Psychohistory. Columbia UP,1984.

Kroll, Jack. “August Wilson’s come to Stay: A Major Writer Illuminates the Black Experience.” Newsweek,1988, pp.82-95.

Kuhry, Robert. Authenticity: The Being of the Self, The World and the Other. Rand E Publishers, 1993.

Levine, Lawrence W. Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro- American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom. Oxford UP, 1977.

Lhamon, W.T, Jr. Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990.

Livingston, Dinah. “Cool August: Mr. Wilson’s Red-Hot Blues.” Conversation with August Wilson. Ed. Jackson R. Bryer, Mary C. Harting. University of Mississippi Press 2006.

Lyons, B, “An Interview with August Wilson.” Contemporary Literature, Collins, 2001.pp. 1- 21.

March, Long. Postmodernism and Fredric Jameson. Penguin, 1990.