August Wilson’s Bioregional Perspective

Readings of place in August Wilson’s drama are plentiful; following Wilson’s lead, scholars routinely address the familiar terrain of Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the dramatist’s Pittsburgh Cycle. Despite the expansiveness of such work, there has been a dearth of ecocritical scholarship on the late playwright’s drama, although his plays open themselves up to such inquiry. It is reasonable to conclude that Wilson scholars have shied away from applying the terms of ecocritical analysis to his body of work because of the uneasy relationship between African American literature and ecocriticsm. Bernard Herzogenrath in his chapter “White” in Prismatic Ecology voices the implicit assumptions in the field of ecocriticism: “In a way, is not a white ecology—at least in the political, racial sense—what has been there, always, what is silently (or not so silently) practiced as the default mode of ecology? Is not green the new white?” (1). The ready association of ecology with whiteness underscores ecocritics’ exclusion of African American texts from analysis, the assumption being that ecocriticism is an orientation best suited to a narrow conceptualization of “nature writing”; however, such a presumption relies on a very limited notion of what constitutes environmental literature.¹ As I have argued elsewhere, the African American expressive tradition has, from its earliest articulations, been place-based, addressing, for example, elements of the biotic world (water, land, and plants) and their relationship to plantation labor, the Diaspora, empire, nationhood, and ancestry. In offering an ecocritical reading of August Wilson’s Seven Guitars and King Hedley II, this paper decolonizes ecological terms and provides a racially inflected reading of place informed by bioregionalism.

Wilson’s place-based aesthetic and his critique of racial and class hegemony make his work a strong candidate for a nuanced reading that adjusts bioregionalism to better address the intersecting issues that face African Americans. Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster in the introduction to The Bioregional Imagination likewise maintain “critics can use literature to help us reimagine bioregionalism itself. For example, works of criticism that explore texts by African American and Chicano writers may challenge (white, middle-class, North American) assumptions about what it means to live responsibly and responsively in a particular place and thus help cultivate an awareness of environmental justice and its importance to the democratic aspirations of the bioregional vision” (17). Further, the editors aver that literary critics can “contribute to the bioregional imagination by enlarging the boundaries of what counts as bioregional literature, drawing out the bioregional implications of texts that have not been seen this way before” (16). Using the categories and concerns of bioregionalism, this article maintains that Wilson’s ecological imagination was steeped in such an ethos: like bioregionalists, who are concerned with their native areas, Wilson was fervently local in his vision of Pittsburgh. Wilson wrote about what he knew best: the bioregion of his youth. He retrieved the stories of place and of the past and in so doing created a bioregional memory map. Reading his ten play sequence as a one-hundred year bioregional narrative, Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle can be used as a tool to “restore the imagination of place,” one in which he placed the Hill District on the map for theatergoers the world over (Iovino 106). The Hill is an impoverished neighborhood that was once a hub of artistic creativity and Black entrepreneurship. To build a public arena in 1961, Pittsburgh urban planners destroyed the Lower Hill and walled off the rest of the neighborhood from the city, a pain and dislocation that reverberates throughout the second half of Wilson’s corpus and continues to affect the city today. In his artistic imagination, the Hill was not just a dying region, marginalized and walled off, but a culturally rich neighborhood, “a meaningful place worthy of attention and love” (Lynch, Glotfelty, and Armbruster 13). In this way, his artistic project can be read as “narrative reinhabitation” which “restores the ecological imagination of place by working with place-based stories” (Iovino 106).

Bioregionalism is a critical orientation that has particular currency for African American literature insofar as “[t...