Interweaving Pittsburgh’s Black Cosmogony: Transgenerational Trauma, African Cultural Affiliation and Spiritual Restoration in August Wilson’s Joe Turner‘s Come and Gone (1988)

Abstract

Abstract : In his ten-play chronicle of African American experience in the twentieth century, August Wilson examines the sway of enslavement in Black Americans’ contemporary condition. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, his second play, delves into the African American experience as well as the examination of trauma in the articulation of a specific historiography. As such, the present study aims at investigating African American experience through the post Slavery era by establishing how sociological prejudiced elements such as history, culture, and race are detrimental to African Americans’ identity construction. The present study also aims to demonstrate how the narrative of the traces formulated by the patterns of water and bones poetics stand as an adjustment of memories to modern contingencies. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone presents then a penetrating and impressive historiographical inferences through the prism of geographical wanderings formalized by the Middle Passage and the Great Migration which echo collective trauma and individual tumult. As such, our study shows how identity construction lies at the center of August Wilson’s narrative of African American experience. As such, his quest for a culturally specific African American cosmological realm is forged from ancestral memories which inform the aesthetics of the call for the ancestors. In that perspective, the African American cosmogony and the convening of African spiritual ethos are informative in providing a clear understanding of African American racial and literary insurgence. Keywords: Culture, enslavement, historiography, identity, spirituality, trauma