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  • The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson
  • Keith Clark
Harry J. Elam, Jr. . The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. 271, illustrated. $60 (Hb).

While not quite comparable to Shakespeare or Faulkner in terms scholarly inquiry, August Wilson is nevertheless becoming something of a cottage industry in African-American literary academia. Since the early 1990s, Wilson's [End Page 448] prodigious body of work has generated a plethora of books, articles, and doctoral dissertations. In fact, Wilson might be more aptly compared with Toni Morrison, who is now enshrined as the major African-American author of her generation, as is reflected in the profusion of books, symposia, and films devoted exclusively to her life and art. Moreover, like Beloved, Wilson's works lend themselves to scholarly investigation from all of the au courant critical and theoretical perspectives – body theory, memory, historicity, psychic and physical trauma, and gender and sexuality. As well, Wilson inhabits an unusual space in Black dramatic arts and letters: he is at once the foremost African-American dramatist of his day and simultaneously the most critically and popularly renowned Black dramatist ever, regardless of the decade or century. Of course, there have been major African-American playwrights: Lorraine Hansberry and Amiri Baraka predate Wilson and hold esteemed places in the Black dramatic tradition. Still, neither of these playwrights has had a string of Broadway-produced plays nor been awarded even a single Pulitzer Prize, an honor that has been bestowed upon Wilson twice. His plays have become staples of major theatre companies from Los Angeles to Chicago to Washington, as well as being widely produced by community and college theatres. Unsurprisingly, the teeming scholarly interest in his works reflects the popular and critical acclaim that he has garnered.

Harry J. Elam, Jr.'s The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson is a recent addition to the burgeoning field of Wilson scholarship. In the book's introduction, Elam lays out his critical framework, briefly expounding upon four major areas and how they will inform his reading of individual plays: "Out of Time," "History," "Memory," and "Ritual" provide the theoretical scaffolding for his study. On the one hand, these might be seen as somewhat belabored concepts, given the profusion of academic studies that have explored these subjects ad infinitum; if nothing else, I was immediately wary of Elam's ostensibly overly ambitious – and potentially unwieldy – critical scope. How would he juggle all of these rather broad critical balls while constructing a unified and cohesive argument about an author whose works themselves encompass an array of discourses – literary, folkloristic, musical, and historical, just to name a few? Given that any one of the topics Elam posits could yield a study in and of itself, how could he sustain a coherent line of critical inquiry? In a lucid and textured analysis, Elam indeed manages to present a sophisticated and highly convincing argument that will have a tremendous impact upon future interpretations of Wilson's plays.

The opening chapter, "The Music Is the Message," explores the trope of the blues, the matrix of all of Wilson's plays. To be sure, some parts of this discussion are relatively pedestrian: for instance, Elam addresses how Wilson's first major play, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, dramatizes the lived hardships and triumphs of its eponymous heroine, as well as the blues lives of her four male band members – all of whom have experienced inexorable exploitation by an unscrupulous [End Page 449] white recording industry while managing to wield a modicum of artistic control. Such concerns have been explored extensively in a number of articles on the play, as well as in scholarship on Rainey herself. However, once Elam turns his keen critical eye to under-read and under-studied works such as Seven Guitars, Two Trains Running, and King Hedley II, the chapter picks up considerable critical momentum and energy. For instance, Elam's discussion of Seven Guitars traces how Wilson draws upon the life of New Orleans musical legend Buddy Bolden as the model for the character King Hedley, a combination conjurer, prophet, and...

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