On The Cultural Identity Of African Americans In Plays By August Wilson

August Wilson is one of the most prestigious African American playwrights inthe1980s. His main achievement can be concluded as the ten play series, for which hereceives two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, a Tony Award and many New York DramaCritics’ Circle Awards. The ten plays are also named Wilson’s “Century Cycle” andevery play in the cycle is set in a different decade, reflecting the unusual and tragicexperience of the African Americans in the twentieth century. Critics regard him to beanother prominent playwright since Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, and ArthurMiller that America has ever produced.Wilson’s plays can be regarded as a panoramic record of black experiences inthe past hundred years. The characters he portrays alienate from their history and losecontact with the African cultural identity. They always feel confused with theircultural identity and struggle to look for spiritual salvation and cultural re-connection.So, this thesis intends to interpret Wilson’s plays from the perspective of culturalidentity. It selects two of his plays, The Piano Lesson and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottomto analyze the character-shaping, the living conditions and the identity crisis of theblacks who make a living in a white-dominated society. And with a close reading ofthe two plays, the thesis aims to investigate the playwright’s view of the culturalidentity of African Americans and his solutions to achieving African Americans’cultural identity.The main body of this thesis can be divided into three chapters. Chapter Oneexplores the identity crisis of African Americans. The crisis comes both from theoutward and inward. Due to historical reasons, African Americans suffer from racialoppression and ethnic discrimination for centuries, and it is difficult for them to berecognized in the mainstream. The slavery system destroys their original Africanculture and cuts their connection with the past. This leads to the fact that they lack thecommon history and cultural traditions that other groups share. For the internal reason,under the long-term suppression of whites, African Americans gradually loseconfidence. Some blacks develop self-hatred, self-rejection as well as a sense of guilt and humiliation towards the whole black race and themselves.Chapter Two discusses the two attempts of Wilson’s characters in establishingtheir cultural identity. August Wilson portrays many distinctive black characters andthey experience sufferings in varying degrees, and they react to it in different ways.Some choose to forget their past and history, deny their African attributes and mistake“black” as the root of all their suffering. They try to stay away from the black societyand converge to the main stream. Other blacks, including Wilson himself, emphasizetheir African cultural identity and think that the blacks should stick to the black rootand develop their own cultural system. They insist that African Americans can notgive up their own cultural traditions just in order to integrate into Americanmainstream society.Chapter Three focuses on Wilson’s view of the black cultural identity. Theanalysis of his story and the fate of his characters reveals that, to Wilson, the best wayto establish cultural identity is to achieve the symbiosis of “white and black” and theequality of “white and black”.August Wilson’s greatest contribution to the black and American literatures lies inhis exploration of African American’s self-identity through his broad artistic vision.The consistent theme running through his plays is that African Americans need toconstruct their own cultural identity by recovering themselves and establishingthemselves to be both an American and an African. Only in this way can they find theindependent cultural identity that their ancestors have fought to seek.