Towards a poetization of the "Field of Manners".

Qun Wang

In awarding the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature to African American novelist Toni Morrison, the Swedish Academy called Morrison "a literary artist of the first rank" whose work is "unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich in variation." The Academy statement then applauded Morrison's linguistic achievement by proclaiming that the writer "delves into the language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race." As Paul Gray correctly observes, the Academy made an honorable choice in Morrison, but for at least one wrong reason. Her purpose, Gray notes, is not to transcend "the blackness of her characters" and to bestow "on them an abstract universality that everyone can understand." It is, instead, to insist "upon the particular racial identities of her fictional people - black women and men under stresses peculiar to them and their station in the U.S." - and "to break through the limitations and prejudices of those lucky enough to read" her fiction (Gray 87).

Indeed, what is so problematic about the Swedish Academy's statement is that the search for abstract universalities not only justifies, but also necessitates, what British scholar Raymond Williams calls the "recognition of the essential." Williams posits that the traditional notion of "typicality" in literature is "in effect a rendering of 'universals,'" those characteristics which purport to be "permanently important elements of human nature and the human condition" (101). The problem with upholding the traditional definition of "typicality," Williams suggests, is that, instead of looking at social and historical reality as a dynamic process, people, in seeking out "permanent elements of the human social situation," gravitate toward "not only recognition of the essential but through this recognition . . . its desirability and inevitability" (102).

African American feminist scholar Mae G. Henderson sees the problem of "the rhetoric of universality" to be as cultural as it is political. Rather than canonizing any voice, including the African American voice, Henderson would prefer "the privileging of difference," or "a multiplicity of 'interested readings,'" in order to resist "the totalizing character of much theory and criticism - readings that can enter into dialogic relationship with other 'interested readings' - past and present." Henderson remains concerned that "the rhetoric of universality . . . has excluded gender, race, and class perspectives from the dominant literary-critical discourse as well as the socio-political centers of power," and she observes that "the reduction of multiplicity to undifferentiated sameness . . . has empowered white feminists to speak for all women, black men to speak for all blacks, and white males to speak for everyone" (156).(2)

Indeed, contrary to what is suggested in the Swedish Academy's statement about Toni Morrison's achievement with language, the best writings in African American literature are not those that use languages that "transcend" the African American experience, but those which are inspired by what Morrison calls "huge silences in literature, things that had never been articulated, printed or imagined" (M. Brown 6A). The best writings in African American literature challenge the cultural, political, and social configuration of the literary voice in America with their insistence on celebrating the African American cultural heritage. As Morrison once told a reporter from the New York Times, "My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger."(3) To understand the ethos of contemporary African American literature is, therefore, to reappropriate our understanding of the dialectical relationship between specificity and universality and between marginality and centralization; to appreciate contemporary African American writers' accomplishments is to understand the importance for African Americans to achieve what Houston A. Baker, Jr., calls "a reversed, or inverted, perceptual reorientation"(77).(4) For without the "perceptual reorientation," African Americans would be condemned to struggle forever in the so-called "double-consciousness" experience described by African American scholar David Levering Lewis in his recent biography of W. E. B. Du Bois as an "epiphenomenal limbo" (282). Or, in African American dramatist August Wilson's words,

I write about the black experience in America and try to explore in terms of the life I know best those things which are common to all cultures. I see myself as answering James Baldwin's call for a profound articulation of the black experience, which he defined as "that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that can sustain a man once he has left his father's house." I try to concretize the values of the black American and place them on stage in loud action to demonstrate the existence of the above "field of manners" and point to some avenues of sustenance.(5)

August Wilson's is one of the most exciting and inspiring voices in contemporary American theater. His plays have won numerous prizes and awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes, five New York Drama Critics Best Play Awards, and a Tony Award. His five full-length plays(6) Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences (1985), Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986), The Piano Lesson (1987), and Two Trains Running (1990) - have been praised by critics as being "compelling," "eloquent," "uplifting," and "powerful." But to go beyond the thumbs-up/thumbs-down formulaic approach in appreciating Wilson's achievement as both a dramatist and a culturalist is to recognize that what distinguishes Wilson from other contemporary American playwrights is the writer's sensitivity, sharpened by his awareness of and determination to celebrate the African American cultural heritage; his sharp ear for a language that is as colorful as the African American experience itself; and his sense of humor, which is compassionate, mesmerizing, and entertaining at the same time.

During his interview with Matteo Bellinelli for SSR-RTSI Swiss Television, Wilson cited four "Bs" as major influences on his works: African American painter Romare Bearden, African American writer Amiri Baraka, Argentinean short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, and, most important of all, the blues. Wilson explained to Bellinelli:

There is nothing like music. Music is everything. In my work, the blues is at the bedrock of everything. That is the foundation on which all my plays are based: the ideas, the attitudes of the characters, are the ideas and attitudes that I discovered in the blues, because I begin to look at the blues as a cultural response that black Americans have to the world they find themselves in[,] and contained in the blues is an entire system, philosophical thought that in fact teaches you how to live your life. I'm coming from the culture which is part of the oral tradition; the elements of the culture pass along orally. A lot of this is done in the blues. Then the music provides you with the emotional reference to the information which is contained in the song.

In African American scholar Sterling A. Brown's article "The Blues as Folk Poetry," Brown defines the blues as "accurate, imaginative transcripts of folk experience, with flashes of excellent poetry," for the blues "combine two great loves, the love of words and the love of life," and "poetry results" (386). Wilson's fascination with the blues has not only taught him lessons about life and cultivated in him an appreciation of his own cultural heritage, it has also developed in the playwright a keen sensitivity to the nuance of language, a sense of humor which can be both entertaining and thought-provoking, and an interest in finding apt metaphors to express his thematic concerns.

Wilson has a sharp ear for the lyrical, musical, and rhythmic cadence of African American English, which, according to Sarah Webster Fabio, "is direct, creative, intelligent communication . . . based on a shared reality, awareness, understanding which generates interaction"; black English "places [a] premium on imagistic renderings and concretizations of abstractions, poetic usages . . . idiosyncrasies - those individualized stylistic nuances (such as violation of structured syntax) - which nevertheless hit 'home' and evoke truth . . ." (34-35). Topics in Wilson's plays are developed through groups of short, rhythmic lines in which certain key words are emphasized. This type of dialogue affords the speaker greater flexibility and maneuverability than do sentences which follow traditional English syntactic structures (such as convoluted sentences with subordinate clauses and modifiers), and the relational structure of the lines emphasizes the harmony of poetic language and thought. Consider, for example, Ma Rainey's observation that

the blues help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain't alone. There's something else in the world. Something's been added by that song. This be an empty world without the blues. I take that emptiness and try to fill it up with something. (Ma 83)

Or consider Boy Willie's thoughts in The Piano Lesson:

See now . . . I'll tell you something about me. I done strung along and strung along. Going this way and that. Whatever way would lead me to a moment of peace. That's all I want. To be as easy with everything. But I wasn't born to that. I was born to a time of fire. (93)

The blues have also instilled in Wilson a sense of humor which works cohesively with his thematic concerns in several of his plays. In "The Blues as Folk Poetry," Sterling Brown rejects a simplistic, one-dimensional approach to the study of the blues: He argues that the blues are not "merely songs that ease a woman's longing for her rambling man"; there are blues of "stoicism" as well as "self-pity," and blues which use "rich humor" as well as those that are "melancholy" (372). In fact, Brown suggests that, even among the love songs, "the gamut can be found running from tenderness to cynicism, from tears to laughter. Love is a torment, or love is a humorous interlude. One takes his choice":

There's nineteen men livin' in my neighborhood, Eighteen of them is dumb an' the other ain't no doggone good.

Love is like a faucet, you can turn it off or on, But when you think you've got it, it's done turned off and gone.

Humor is sometimes created in the blues with the use of "comic hyperbole":

I creeps up to huh window jes to hear how sweet she snores . . . .

Done drunk so much whisky I staggers in my sleep.

Yet, at other times, the sardonic tone of the lines highlights the speaker's tragic sense of life:

Want to lay my head on de railroad line, Let de train come along and pacify my mind.

I'm goin' to de mountain, goin' to de deep blue sea.

I know de sharks an' de fishes gonna make a fuss over me. (384-85)

Langston Hughes defines the term Negro humor as "laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it"; Negro humor is "when the joke is on you but hits the other fellow first - before it boomerangs"; Negrohumor "is what you wish in your secret heart were not funny, but it is, and you must laugh"; Negro humor "is your own unconscious therapy" (Hughes vii). The undercurrent that runs below the surface of African American jokes. it appears, is a dark sense of humor(7): It is dark because humor is employed by people to cope with a painful situation in the hope that it can help alleviate the pain and protect a person's emotional integrity.

In Wilson's plays, humor is generated as much by the cacophony of human relationships as by African Americans' insight into the kind of social injustice they have to deal with in their lives. In Fences, for instance, humor is used to portray the tender and passionate, but nonetheless trying, relations of Troy Maxson and his wife Rose. When Troy brags to Bono that he was the one who decided when and whether he and Rose should get married, Rose corrects Troy:

Rose: I told him if he wasn't the marrying kind, then move out the way so the marrying kind could find me.

Troy: That's what she told me. "Nigger, you in my way. You blocking the view! Move out the way so I can find me a husband." I thought it over two or three days. Come back -

Rose: Ain't no two or three days nothing. You was back the same night. (6)

Humor is also used in Joe Turner's Come and Gone and Two Trains Running, where it accentuates the hardships and adversity African Americans have to go through in life. In Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the song Herald Loomis's eleven-year-old daughter Zonia sings is apparently a parody of the song that, among other things, made the movie Annie famous. The song's humor is foiled by its melancholy tone, for the irony that is used in the song is generated by the singer's anticipation of adversities in life:

I went downtown to get my grip I came back home Just a pullin' the skiff

I went upstairs To make my bed I made a mistake And I bumped my head Just a pullin' the skiff

I went downstairs To milk the cow I made a mistake And I milked the sow Just a pullin' the skiff

Tomorrow, tomorrow Tomorrow never comes The marrow the marrow The marrow in the bone. (26-27)

In Two Trains Running, when African American restauranteur Memphis wonders how his counterpart West, a funeral home owner, can make dead people look natural, his customer Wolf explains, "That's what the people say. Say they look better than when they was living. That's why the people like West" (12). Humor cannot get darker than this.

In "The Blues as Folk Poetry," Sterling Brown also accentuates the poetic quality of the blues by pointing out its use of imagery:

The images of the Blues are worthy of a separate study. At their best they are highly compressed, concrete, imaginative, original. Among the cliches, the inconsecutiveness, the false rhymes - one finds suddenly the startling figure:

My gal's got teeth lak a lighthouse on de sea. Every time she smiles she throws a light on me. . . .

Ef Blues was whisky, I'd stay drunk all de time.

Blues ain't nothin' but a po' man's heart-disease. (383-84)

Wilson's interest in using metaphors as tropes to express his thematic concerns in drama again suggests the impact of the blues on the playwright's style. Wilson's use of metaphors in his plays is accurate, precise, and powerful; it demonstrates the writer's awareness that to poetize the dramatization of the African American experience is to identify tropes that can bridge the gap between the visible and the invisible, between the permanent and the impermanent, and between the physical world and metaphysical contemplation.

In each of Wilson's five long plays, the playwright's iconographic use of metaphors is as effective as it is symbolic. In Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, for example, the young musician Levee is recalcitrant and restless. Levee's talent does not match his ambition, but he dreams about being able to write his own song and start his own band. The two items that Levee values very much are his new shoes and his trumpet: If the shoes concretely emblematize the possibility of a new beginning, the trumpet is what can turn that possibility into reality.

The thematic structure of Fences relies heavily on two props: Troy Maxson's baseball bat and the fence that envelops his house. Troy is a talented baseball player, but he is not given the opportunity to use his athletic ability in a prejudiced society. The baseball bat thus becomes a constant reminder of Troy's unfulfilled dreams, and the fence a manifestation of the consequences. With the fence, Troy is able to hide behind his false sense of security, but the fence also creates a physical and mental barrier which brings the ontological meaning of Troy's life into question.

The "chain" in Wilson's third long play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, is not used on stage as a prop. But it functions in the same way as the fence does in Fences. The title of the play Joe Turner's Come and Gone derives from a traditional blues song, "Joe Turner," which describes a woman's loss of a loved one to Joe Turner's chain gang. Three years after forced labor as a member on Joe Turner's chain gang, Herald Loomis, one of the main characters in. Joe Turner's Come and Gone, has to learn how to free himself from spiritual enslavement. Loomis's struggle with the chain that binds his mind is, therefore, as crucial to determining his future as Troy Maxon's struggle with the fence is quintessential to reassessing that character's relationship with the past. Loomis's final realization, that ". . . Joe Turner's come and gone and Herald Loomis ain't for no binding" (91), signals the beginning of a new life, a beginning that is made possible by Loomis's being able to rediscover his "own song" (73).

During Wilson's interview with Bill Moyers for the "World of Ideas" program in 1988, the playwright used "the song" as a trope to represent a person's struggle with his/her identity. Wilson believes that "everyone has his song," but people "have to realize it. . . . they have to sing it" (4). The songs strewn through Wilson's plays concretely objectify both his characters' aspiration to affirm their identity and their search for ways to celebrate that identity. The Piano Lesson is another play about characters' search for their songs. As the title indicates, the conflict in The Piano Lesson mainly revolves around a piano which, with carvings of Berniece and Boy Willie's family members' pictures, is as heavy as the family history. But the piano's value lies as much in the way it is viewed as in the way it is used. Berniece's fear of touching the piano is just as inept as her brother Boy Willie's intent to capitalize on its values is question-begging.

Wilson's latest play, Two Trains Running, was first staged on March 27, 1990, at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and opened on Broadway on April 13, 1992, at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. The thematic power of Two Trains Running, much like that of his previous plays, is generated by the collision of conflicting logics. But instead of focusing on the clash between the old and the new, between the past and the present, and between tradition and reality, the struggle in Two Trains Running develops between the rules of games and the necessity to break them, between the practicality of common sense and the ideology of principles, and between life and death. The struggle is iconographically emblematized in the play by the menu in African American restauranteur Memphis Lee's restaurant and the caskets in his counterpart West's funeral home.

Bill Moyers, during his interview with Wilson, compares the African American experience and the experience of American Jews. He points out that, during Passover, Jewish people always remind themselves in their prayer, "Next year in Jerusalem." Since African Americans do not have a Jerusalem, Moyers wonders if their prayer might be: "Next year in the American dream," or "I have a dream that I can make it in this country"? Wilson responds by reminding Moyers that

. . . there's another part of Passover, I was invited to one time, a friend of mine invited me, and I was struck by the very first words. It starts off: "We were slaves in the land of Egypt," you see. Now that's the first thing and then "Next year in Jerusalem" comes at the end. But they were constantly reminding themselves of what their historical situation has been, see, and I think, for instance, I find it criminal in fact that we, after hundreds of years in bondage, do not celebrate our Emancipation Proclamation; that we do not have a thing like the Passover where we sit down and we remind ourselves that we are African people, that we were slaves. Because we try to run away, we try to hide that part of our past. We don't have that. If we did something like that, it would say, "this is who we are." We would recognize the fact that we are Africans, we would recognize the fact that we were slaves, and we would recognize that since we have a common past, that we have a common future also. (6)

Wilson also points out that one reason that African Americans do not have their own "Passover" has to do with the negative "linguistic environment" they have had to deal with, and he uses the example of what a person could find in a Webster's Dictionary under the words white and black to prove his point:

I was in Tucson, at a writers conference, and I challenged my host to pull out his dictionary and look up the words "white" and "black." And he looked up the word "white," and he came up with things like white, unmarked by malignant influence, of desirable condition, a sterling man, bright, fair and honest. Then you look up the word "black," and you get a villain, marked by malignant influence, unqualified, violator of laws, etc. And these are actual definitions in a Webster's dictionary. So this is a part of the linguistic environment, so that when white America looks at a black, they see the opposite of everything that they are. (5)

African American scholar Joseph A. Baldwin takes an Afrocentric approach in discussing the cause for the alienated feeling African Americans experience living in the United States. Baldwin argues that "the condition of 'disorder' in Black personality occurs at the level of African Self-Consciousness, . . . where socialization and/or experiential indoctrination processes are reflective of an alien cosmology (as is the circumstance of most African-Americans today), to the extent that such an experience is experientially dominant (e.g., significant others in the form of persons or institutional processes) for the African person." Baldwin adds that, when "the alien cosmology is in fact anti-African, as in Western society, where the dominant cosmology is 'European cosmology,' then the nature of the distorting and misorienting influences on African Self-Consciousness becomes 'anti-African' as well." To preserve African Americans' mental health, Baldwin contends, requires one to realize the estrangement of the Black personality from its "natural condition" and try to restore "African Self-Consciousness" (184).

The Wilson theater provides African Americans with an opportunity to reorient themselves toward the restoration of their "African Self-Consciousness." The enactment of the African American vernacular tradition in Wilson's plays serves two purposes. First, Wilson's use of language concretizes on stage the richness of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls African American "vernacular, or oral tradition." In his article "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition," Gates suggests that to reassess African American literary and cultural achievement is to recognize "the formal relationships that obtain among texts in the black tradition - relations of revision, echo, call and response, antiphony, what have you -" and to recognize "the vernacular roots of the tradition." For the vernacular tradition, according to Gates, "has a canon of its own" (102). In the article "Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It's Greek To Me," Gates makes another plea to create what he calls "vernacular criticism":

. . . if only for the record, let me state clearly here that only a black person alienated from black language-use could fail to understand that we have been deconstructing white people's languages and discourse since that dreadful day in 1619 when we were marched off the boat in Virginia. Derrida did not invent deconstruction, we did! That is what the blues and signifying are all about. Ours must be a signifying, vernacular criticism, related to other critical theories, yet indelibly black, a critical theory of our own. (26)

Whereas the efficacy of Gates's deconstructionist approach to the study of African American vernacular tradition remains controversial,(8) no one can dispute the tradition's influence on the formation and development of mainstream culture in America. Wilson's use of language calls audiences' attention to a tradition which has not only enriched, but also helped to shape and define, American culture with contributions such as the blues, call-and-response, the dozens, and, most recently, rap.

The enactment of the African American vernacular tradition in the Wilson theater also serves another purpose. It enables African American audience members to resituate themselves in history, to remind themselves of their current position in society, and to celebrate their cultural identity. Michel Foucault believes that history is what enables human beings to communicate with each other, for "all knowledge is rooted in a life, a society, and a language that have a history; and it is in that very history that knowledge finds the element enabling it to communicate with other forms of life, other types of society, other significations."(9) By using an historical approach in his tour-de-force dramatization of the African American experience, Wilson has created a theater that allows African Americans to use their own language and cultural metaphors to communicate with history, to understand the dialectical relationship between collective experience (history) and individual identity and responsibility (re-vision), and to celebrate their own "Passover."

Notes

1. During his interviews with Bill Moyers and Matteo Bellinelli, August Wilson declared that he saw himself as answering James Baldwin's call for a profound articulation of the black experience - "that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that can sustain a man once he has left his father's house."

2. In her article, Henderson attempts to explain the ideological and theoretical differences between the approach used by African American feminists and that employed by male critics such as Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker in the study of African American literature and culture.

3. Critic Katherine Lanpher uses the quotation to challenge the Swedish Academy's statement about Morrison's achievement with language (D3).

4. In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, Houston Baker suggests that "the Black Aesthetic generation produced a change in the perceptual field of Afro-American literary study that amounted, finally, to a 'revolutionary transformation' of literary-critical and literary-theoretical vision vis-a-vis Afro-American expressive culture . . . . The integrationists assumed as a first principle that art was an American area of achievement in which race and class were not significant variables. To discover or assert that the 'Negro-ness' or 'Blackness' of an expressive work was a fundamental condition of its 'artistic-ness' was for a new generation to 'flip over' the entire integrationist field of vision. Such a reversed, or inverted, perceptual reorientation is precisely what [Stephen] Henderson and his Black Aesthetic contemporaries achieved" (76-77).

5. Wilson has made the same declaration on several different occasions, including his interviews with Bill Moyers and Matteo Bellinelli. The statement is also included in Richard Christiansen's reference article on Wilson (571).

6. Before 1984, some of August Wilson's short plays such as Black Bart and the Sacred Hills, Jitney, Fullerton Street, The Coldest Day of the Year, and The Janitor were produced in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

7. The term dark humor used here should be distinguished from the term black humor, which is often used to describe a style of writing that evolved in America in the 1960s. Max F. Schultz, in his book Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties, defines black humor as a depiction of "an absurd world devoid of intrinsic values, with a resultant tension between individual and universe" (6); it "enacts no individual release or social reconciliation," for "Black Humor condemns man to a dying world" (8). The kind of humor that is used both in the blues and in Wilson's plays is geared more toward the struggle in human relationships as well as toward social injustice; it points out both the intensity of the struggle between life and death and between love and hate, as well as the possibility of emotional catharsis.

8. Several African American scholars - such as Michele Wallace, in Invisibility Blues; Mae Henderson, in her "Response" to Houston Baker; Joyce A. Joyce, in "The Black Canon"; and Barbara Christian, in "The Race for Theory" - have questioned the appropriateness of Henry Louis Gates's and Houston Baker's use of Western philosophies and theories, such as structuralism and post-structuralism, to critique African American literature and culture.

9. In The Invention of Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe uses the quotation to suggest the paradigmatic difference between Foucault and Levi-Strauss's epistemological approach: Foucault emphasizes "the possibility of a new anthropology and its dependence on Western history" and is "concerned with the future of anthropology," whereas Levi-Strauss attempts to distinguish the "methodological question from the epistemological one" and is "concerned with ways of describing the solidarity that might exist between history and anthropology" (29).

Works Cited

Baker, Houston A., Jr. Blues Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Baldwin, Joseph A. "African Self-Consciousness and the Mental Health of African-Americans." Journal of Black Studies 15.2 (1984): 177-94.

Bellinelli, Matteo. "A Conversation with August Wilson." In Black and White. San Francisco: California Newsreel, 1992.

Brown, Michael. "Novelist Morrison Wins Nobel Prize." St. Paul Pioneer Press 8 Oct. 1993: 6A.

Brown, Sterling A. "The Blues as Folk Poetry." Book of Negro Folklore. Ed. Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. New York: Dodd, 1958. 371-86.

Christian, Barbara. "The Race for Theory." Cultural Critique 6.1 (1987): 51-63.

Christiansen, Richard. "August Wilson." Contemporary Dramatists. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick. 4th ed. Chicago: St. James, 1988. 571-72.

Fabio, Sarah Webster. "Who Speaks Negro? What Is Black?" Negro Digest 17.9-10 (1968): 33-37.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "The Master's Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition." South Atlantic Quarterly 89.1 (1990): 89-111.

-----. "Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It's Greek To Me." Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 19-46.

Gray, Paul. "Toni Morrison." Time 18 Oct. 1993: 86-87.

Henderson, Mae G. "Response." Afro-American Literary Study in the 1900s. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 155-63.

Hughes, Langston, ed. The Book of Negro Humor. New York: Dodd, 1966.

Joyce, Joyce A. "The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism." New Literary History 18.2 (1987): 335-43.

Lanpher, Katherine. "Words, Spirit of Toni Morrison Liberate the Bound Book." St. Paul Pioneer Press 10 Oct. 1993: D3.

Moyers, Bill. "Interview with August Wilson." World of Ideas. PBS, New York, 20 Oct. 1988.

Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Schulz, Max F. Black Humor Fiction of the Sixties. Athens: Ohio UP, 1973.

Wallace, Michele. Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory. London: Verso, 1990.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1977.

Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Plume, 1986.

-----. Joe Turner's Come and Gone. New York: Plume, 1988.

-----. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. New York: Plume, 1985.

-----. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

-----. Two Trains Running. New York: Plume, 1993.

Qun Wang is Associate Professor of Humanities at California State University-Monterey Bay; he has authored numerous articles on American ethnic literatures and cultures and is currently completing a manuscript on August Wilson.