Emi: The concept of spirit in selected plays of August Wilson

This dissertation examines five selected plays written by August Wilson: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Fences, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and Two Trains Running. Each play represents Wilson's documentation and preservation of cultural and historical experiences of African Americans. In fact, Wilson's chronology of events allows each play to depict a decade in the lives of African Americans in the twentieth century. The events extend from the emergence of African people from Southern enslavement to their resettlement in the urban North following the Great Migration.;The focus of the study is to determine how the ancestral icons and characters relate to the concept of Emi (spirit). Using an African-centered framework, the researcher identifies and examines in the plays evidence of Emi (spirit), in African American culture, as the concealed force underlying the expressions of African American dynamics. The analysis and demonstration of the evidence of Emi includes the use of Welsh Asante's Nzuri theoretical model and the Ifa spiritual system of the Yoruba people of Nigeria, West Africa.;This analysis attempts to examine and explain the plays of August Wilson within the context of an African-centered critique. In doing so, this work provides further theoretical advancement of the African-centered method. In the end, the researcher concludes that the body of August Wilson's work is best conceived of as a "Futu," a container of information that belongs to the community. The "Futu" has protective and curative medicine capable of awakening and influencing the thinking and spiritness of the culture. Finally, the researcher has determined that the playwright, August Wilson, should be reclassified as a healer whose medicine is found within the material of African-centered plays that guide the audience to a reawakening of ancestral memory which recalls Emi (spirit).