Constructing African American Cultural Identity: Blues In August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come And Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom And The Piano Lesson

In terms of Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s "Blues Vernacular" theory, the blues is conceived as a matrix that reflects the complex and reflexive African American culture, and it is the multiplex and enabling script in which the African American cultural discourse is inscribed. Hence, by dramatizing the blues, the matrix of the African American expressive culture, August Wilson invests the insightful fragments of the African American culture, and provides an important access for the African Americans to construct their cultural identities in his three plays Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and The Piano Lesson.As the token of the African American culture, blues music permeates through August Wilson's three plays, such as "They Tell Me Joe Turner's Come and Gone" sung by Bynum in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" sung by Ma Rainey in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and "I Want You to Help Me" sung by Berniece in The Piano Lesson, etc. The perpetual rhythm of these blues songs exposes the common blues experiences of the African Americans and fully proves the pervasive force of the blues music in the daily life of the African Americans.However, August Wilson in his three plays also shows his concern about the crisis of the African American cultural identity. Due to the influence of the impotent political and economic status, and the suppression and deceit of the hegemonic dominant culture, many African Americans hold ambivalent attitudes when affirming their cultural identities. And some of them even become the victims or scapegoats of the African American cultural identity crisis, among whom Seth in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Levee in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and Berniece in The Piano Lesson are typical examples. Therefore, how to seek for the equal discourse power, or more exactly, to move the "absent" African Americans to an always present subject position has become an urgent problem to be resolved for the construction of the African American cultural identity in the mainstream culture and globalization as well.Consequently, by singing out the blues, Bynum and Loomis in Joe Turner's Come and Gone reclaim their alienated selves, and Levee in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom sings his own song of cultural identity. What's more, the siblings Berniece and Boy Willie in The Piano Lesson make connection to the African cultural legacy. All of them preserve their own culture and construct their cultural identities at last. In this sense, the blues, the primary image and matrix of the African American expressive culture, also the conveyor of the African American history, to some extent highlights the Africanness of the African Americans, and provides them with permanent emotional journey to the American South, where their past lies, where they know who they are and where their cultural identities are constructed.