Pittsburgh's August Wilson African American Cultural Center

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-112
Author(s):  
Emad Mirmotahari
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
August Wilson

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

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

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.

August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey.

1997 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 343
Author(s):  
Sandra G. Shannon ◽  
Kim Pereira
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
August Wilson

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

2021 ◽  
pp. 002193472110553
Author(s):  
Samuel Ato Bentum
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Complex Phenomenon ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Narrative Style ◽  
Piano Lesson ◽  
Lesson Play

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.

scholarly journals Narrative of the Krueger-Scott Mansion Project: Constructing Newark History

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 151
Author(s):  
Katie Singer
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Public Knowledge ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
Urban Study ◽  
To Receive

<p><em>Newark, New Jersey’s once proposed Krueger-Scott African-American Cultural Center (KSAACC) tells a story of history, economy, race, built environment, and much more. The Center’s development mirrors other urban stories with regard to race, preservation, urban failure, and memory, while also offering a unique understanding of Newark’s own history. The story of the 1990s Krueger-Scott project adds chapters to urban study as a whole, and to the study of Black cultural sites around the country.</em></p><p><em>The KSAACC was met with and has continued to receive resistance from some of Newark’s citizens as well as local journalists and ultimately the very politicians who had at first supported the idea. The ongoing financing of what seemed to some a less than urgent project in a city that had so many pressing needs at the time became a source of tension and ultimately splintered the community. </em></p><p><em>Matters such as these speak to some larger questions concerning the value and place of public history, oral history, and historic preservation in urban environments.  This paper is about the creation of African-American historical knowledge and the ways America sees fit to make it public knowledge. </em></p>

Invisible Ball of Dreams

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Ruth Rutter
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
The Other ◽  
Gloria Naylor ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Negro Leagues ◽  
History Of ◽  
African American Communities ◽  
The One

Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when they consider the story of race and racism in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), black baseball was a long-standing, if underdocumented, staple of African American communities. This book examines creative portraits of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Divided into three literary waves, the book is especially attentive to the archival contributions (and at times drawbacks) of imaginative representations of black baseball. Specifically, the book argues that African American and Euro-American novelists, playwrights, poets, and filmmakers fill in gaps and silences in recorded baseball history; democratize access to archives by sharing their research with readers; and advance countermythologies to whitewashed baseball lore. Reading representations across the literary color line also opens up a propitious space for exploring black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Thus, while this book’s particular focus is black baseball, the comparative, archival mode of analysis utilized herein provides a model for analyzing literary interventions in other marginalized cultural histories as well.

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