어거스트 윌슨 : 탈식민주의적 읽기

Abstract

This paper attempts to read August Wilson’s four plays, Jitney, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson and Two Trains Running from a postcolonial point of view. Wilson is a black cultural nationalist and his texts contain postcolonial resistance discourse to imperial discourse. So his four plays are constructed as an elaborate counter discourse for expressing African Americans’ resistant consciousness against white ideology through African ritual, warriors, and rewriting African American history. Wilson assumes the term “cultural difference”, a significant postcolonial concept suggested by Homi Bhabha, to examine the relation between blacks and whites. Wilson makes use of African Americans’ culture to overcome white dominant discourse. Wilson has written ten cycles plays that deal with African Americans’ experiences of the twentieth century since Emancipation. He is concerned with cultural values and the quest for African American identity through the African ritual. In Jitney Wilson created his first warrior, Booster, who refused to work for the white man. Wilson said that he wrote Joe Turner’s Come and Gone in order to teach the importance of African American cultural and racial past. For Loomis the journey toward self-knowledge includes two apocalyptic rituals. At last he is born again as an African Loomis by finding his own song. The themes of separation, migration, and reunion are central to Wilson’s exploration of the search for cultural identity and self-affirmation. In The Piano Lesson Boy Willie and Bernice have fought with the white ghost of Sutter trying to exorcise him from their lives. In Two Trains Running Hambone’s loud talking protest reveals the fundamental injustice of an American economic system. Wilson regularly insists that African American ancestral voices must be heard. So the lesson of four plays is that African American voices and culture must be sustained through spiritual reconciliation. As a black cultural nationalist August Wilson stresses the need to cherish and enhance the cultural values of African Americans in order to establish the subjective relationship with American society. Because Wilson’s four plays stress African Americans’ struggle for black liberation, a postcolonial reading that insists on African Americans’ resistant consciousness becomes possible