August Wilson

The most accomplished of all African American dramatists in the last half of the 20th century, August Wilson, a high-school dropout and Black Power activist in the 1960s, opened his first major play, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, on Broadway in 1984 with great critical and commercial success. The first of Wilson’s “20th-century cycle,” a series of plays designed to treat African American life in every decade of the past century, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which concerns blues musicians during the 1920s, was followed by Fences (produced 1985), which delineates a father-son conflict in a working-class family of the 1950s; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (produced 1986), about a displaced Southern Black man’s quest for his wife in 1911 Pittsburgh; The Piano Lesson (produced 1987), in which competing ideas about their legacy threatens to rupture an African American family in the 1930s; and Two Trains Running (produced 1990), a look at the Black Power ideals of the 1960s from the perspective of the late 1980s. Fences and The Piano Lesson both won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilson’s later plays, Seven Guitars (produced 1995), Jitney! (produced in 1982 and revived in 1996), King Hedley II (produced 1999), and Gem of the Ocean (produced 2003), continued to excite the admiration of critics and viewers alike.

African American roots

The reclamation of African American history has propelled imaginatively an unusual number of Black novelists into the past, producing a new literary genre that many have called the neo-slave narrative. Building on historical novels such as Jubilee and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, African American fiction of the last quarter of the 20th century reopened the scars of slavery in search of keys to the meaning of freedom in the post-civil rights era. Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), a fictionalized family history of seven generations traced back to Africa, took the United States by storm when, as a 1977 television miniseries, it attracted the largest audience yet for a feature film about Black Americans. Subsequent novels returned to the slavery era to retrieve lost or suppressed heroes and heroines, as in Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), or to effect healing and self-awareness in contemporary African Americans, exemplified by David Bradley’s historian protagonist in The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Revisionist satire spurred Alice Randall to create The Wind Done Gone (2001), a parody of the 20th century’s most extensively read historical novel, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936).

Experiments with retelling the slave narrative in forms that would liberate its significance to today’s African American struggle began with Ishmael Reed’s exuberant Flight to Canada (1976) and extended into the metafiction of philosophical novelist Charles R. Johnson. In Oxherding Tale (1982), Johnson sends his biracial fugitive slave protagonist on a quest for emancipation that he can attain only by extricating himself, in Johnson’s own words, from “numerous kinds of ‘bondage’ (physical, psychological, sexual, metaphysical).” Like the sophisticated, self-conscious trickster who narrates Oxherding Tale, the hero of Johnson’s second novel, Middle Passage, which won the National Book Award in 1990, is also a product of slavery who must go on a dangerous journey—the infamous Middle Passage that brought Africans to enslavement in the Americas—to overcome his alienation from humanity and save himself from imprisoning ideas about self and race. The triumph of Rutherford Calhoun, the protagonist of Middle Passage, comes when he absorbs the enlightened moral and philosophical understanding of the Allmuseri, an African tribe of sorcerers who teach Calhoun to reject the materialism of the enslavers and adopt a holism free from the categories of self and other, on which exploitative hierarchies (such as race) are based. The most celebrated and distinguished of the neo-slave narratives, however, is Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), rivaled only by Ellison’s Invisible Man as the most influential African American novel of the second half of the 20th century. A reinvocation of the Margaret Garner case of 1856, in which an escaped slave mother killed her infant daughter rather than allowing slave catchers to return her to slavery in Kentucky, Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Four years later, Morrison published Jazz, a novel of murder and reconciliation set in Harlem during the 1920s, and Playing in the Dark, a trenchant examination of whiteness as a thematic obsession in American literature. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her later works include Paradise (1998), which traces the fate of an all-Black town in 1970s Oklahoma, and, with her son Slade, a children’s book, The Big Box (1999).

In accepting the Nobel Prize, Morrison stated: “Word-work is sublime…because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.” Although Morrison was ostensibly speaking here of humanity’s difference from the rest of the creation, in light of the achievement of her African American literary predecessors from Wheatley forward, Morrison may well have been alluding also to the “word-work” of Black America, which has generated through its literature the restoration of Black racial “difference” from a sign of supposed absence or lack to a symbol of artistic mastery.