A Review ofAugust & Africa By Dr. Sandra Shannon |
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On September 24, 2020, the August Wilson Society hosted number two in the increasing lineup of the organization’s popular August Wilson's Ground Annual Lecture Series. This year’s webinar on the underexplored theme August and Africa cultivated new ground, planted fresh seeds for August Wilson Studies, and sparked both national and international interest. |
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On the surface, the September 2020 August and Africa lecture appeared to have little in common with the lecture series' September 2019 launch, which boasted a VIP Reception and Fundraiser, a Pittsburgh-based blues band, a tantalizing spread of refreshments, and an enormous crowd that nearly took up the entire first level of Howard University's sprawling Interdisciplinary Research Building. In addition to its move to a virtual format, perhaps the biggest difference in the 2020 lecture was that it featured a series of five speakers rather than last year’s single dynamic lecturer: University of Maryland's Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, who headlined this inaugural event with her focus upon the cultural resonances of food in Wilson's canon. |
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Differences aside, this year's illuminating webinar on the influence of Africa in August Wilson's American Century Cycle was nonetheless engaging. It attracted audiences from as far away as Nigeria and as close by as Washington, DC and Maryland. The webinar also ushered into the global studio Constanza Romero Wilson, Wilson's wife and Executor of the August Wilson Estate, who stopped by for a second year to welcome online guests and offer encouraging words of support for the August Wilson's Ground Lecture Series. |
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Credit is also due to the webinar format for putting five of the world's foremost voices on African and African American cultural studies in conversation on the topic of August and Africa. These renowned scholars, who assembled from as far away as Panama and as nearby as Pennsylvania and North Carolina, included Dr. Molefi Asante, Paul Carter Harrison, Dr. Sandra L. Richards, Omiyemi Artisia Green, and Dr. Nemata Blyden. Serving as the event moderator and hostess for the evening, Dr. Sandra Shannon, August Wilson Society President and Howard University Professor Emerita, set the tone and provided helpful context for the discussion of August and Africa and introduced the stellar lineup of speakers who shared fresh critical commentary on this topic. |
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Temple University scholar and author Dr. Molefi Keti Asante, a leading figure in the fields of African American studies, African studies, and Communications studies and President of the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies, began the discussion with his talk entitled " August Wilson’s Dramas Studded with African Elements: Seeing Things Often Unseen" in which he revealed how African elements such as libations, Maat, family relationships, children, ancestral reverence, symbolisms, and beauty in doing are reflected in Wilson's dramas. |
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On the heels of Asante's powerful lecture was Paul Carter Harrison, an award-winning playwright, director, theatre theorist, and author of the plays Tophat, Abercrombie Apocalypse, and his signature Obie Award-winning play, The Great MacDaddy and The Drama of Nommo), a seminal collection of essays on African Diasporic expression. Harrison argued in his presentation entitled " King Hedley II: Ritual Mode" that King Hedley II, one of Wilson’s most monumental works, achieves very limited resonance among black audiences. He is troubled by the white audience's disregard for the extended soliloquies as a tedious self-indulgence in what he calls "the prolix of gangsta rap, the sublimely poetic narrative of Wilson’s ritual drama that becomes arrested in the stasis of melodramatic directorial conventions that never allow the work to realize its intended epiphany. " |
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Interspersed throughout the evening's presentations were recorded blues selections and infomercials that included an introduction to the student-based Howard Players organization by Theatre Arts professor Denise Joy Hart, and a fundraising appeal by Howard Player members and AWS Boward of Directors members Lauryn Williams and Deimoni Brewington. |
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August and Africa continued with a very engaging lecture and a stunning accompanying PowerPoint presentation by Northwestern University's Professor Emerita Dr. Sandra L. Richards, who titled her discussion, "What Is This 'Africa' in August Wilson Plays and Scholarship?" Richards, who taught African American Studies and Theatre at Northwestern, who authored numerous articles on a range of black dramatists, and who served as co-editor for the MLA Handbook of Approaches to Teaching the Plays of August Wilson and The Routledge Companion to African American Theatre and Performance, suggests that it is time for us to raise new questions about ways in which “Africa” functions as a memory that animates Wilson’s characters as well as his audiences. For example, she asks, Why are there few references to an Africa contemporaneous to the experiences of Wilson’s characters? And what are the implications of this paucity and our critical failure to acknowledge it? |
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Omiyemi Artisia Green, Associate Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies, W. Taylor Reveley, III Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellow, and Director of the Program in Africana Studies at William & Mary, took the baton from Richards and continued with a fascinating talk entitled “See You at the Crossroads”: Doors and Thresholds in the American Century Cycle." Green investigated the implications of Wilson’s use of the symbolic door while connecting it to themes of freedom and identity explored across the Cycle. She argued that one of the most powerful symbols associated with West Africa are the “doors of no return” found in places like Gorée Island in Senegal and Elmina in Ghana. She posits that Wilson signifies on these liminal spaces that led Africans from freedom to slavery, ending each play of the American Century Cycle with a door or a threshold crossing to which he directs his characters. |
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Dr. Nemata Blyden, African and African Diasporic History Professor at George Washington University, and author of the recently published African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press), rounded out the evening with an eye-opening presentation geared toward modern audiences entitled, “It has nothing to do with putting on beads or dashikis": August Wilson and the Place of Africa." Blyden explored Wilson’s writings on the place of Africa in black America and the historical relationship between African Americans and Africa. She situated Wilson within a long discourse of African American understandings of the role Africa plays in their history and culture. |
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The final session of the day brought together in a single split screen the moderator Dr. Shannon along with the five speakers eager who eagerly responded to questions that had accumulated in the Q&A feature. After the group entertained several intriguing queries, the curtains fell on August and Africa leaving the remaining audience to enjoy samples of August Wilson-style blues by vocalists Anitra McKinney and Jouelle Roberson. |
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The August Wilson Society wishes to acknowledge the following sponsors and partners for its 2020 August Wilson's Ground Lecture, August and Africa. Howard University ~ August Wilson African American Cultural Center ~ Howard University Center for African Studies ~ Ernest C. Jackson ~ Denise J. Hart ~ Tijuani P. Jackson ~ August Wilson Society |
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Stay tuned for the next August Wilson's Ground Lecture in September 2021! |
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