Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone: A Search for African American Identity

Abstract

August Wilson, a prolific American playwright, centers most of his plays on African American experiences. His Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is an excellent work in the field of American drama that reveals the African American experience of 1910s. It appropriately treats the transitional phase in American history, that is, the Great Migration. It also clearly depicts the legacy of slavery. In this phase most of the blacks were deprived of their cultural practices. The forced slavery had destroyed their identity and the sense of self-worth. Blacks’ tradition and culture were dominated and marginalized by the western tradition and culture. Wilson is in the view of acquiring spiritual as well as economic empowerment as essential factors for black Americans to recover their identity and sense of self-worth. If one has to reestablish his identity, he must come to terms with his collective past and cultural roots. The present study taking into account his Joe Turner’s Come and Gone shows how Wilson succeeds in presenting blacks' efforts and struggles to reestablish their identity. It mainly shows how Herald Loomis, a representative black, acquires his sense of self-worth and identity. August Wilson, through Herald Loomis, argues that the clues of rediscovering their African American identity lie in the collective past and cultural roots. Blacks should set them free from all western cultural and theological domination and embrace their African cultural practices to regain their self.