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Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Pp. 418. $29.95.
The impact on contemporary American and African-American theater attributable to August Wilson, whom we lost in October of 2005, will continue to be discernible for many years to come. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights cycle of ten plays, each set in a different decade of the twentieth century, reasserts the necessity of a playwright's attention to the modalities and cadences of spoken language and realizes our highest aspirations for the art form by bringing to the stage characters and situations that are finely crafted yet so immense that in hindsight they seem like myths or legends. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora is evidence of Wilson's influence on the interpretation and theorization of drama as well. In the book's preface, Paul Carter Harrison describes a 1996 speech that Wilson delivered at Princeton University entitled "The Ground on Which I Stand." In it, the author of plays such as Fences, The Piano Lesson, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom "dropped the gauntlet on skepticism about the validity of Black Theater" (1). Challenging the faulty assumption that drama by and about people of African descent is of only parochial interest, Wilson declared, "there is no idea that cannot be contained by black life" (1). Moreover, he demonstrated a sophisticated conceptualization of race and/as identity: "Black or African-American not only denote race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory" (1). Perhaps his most significant statement was on the continued necessity of black dramatic artists to draw from the cultural traditions of the African diaspora for the sake of maintaining those traditions and making black theater a site of consistent innovation. According to Harrison, Wilson encouraged "jettisoning the aesthetic models of Western tradition" and embracing the "spiritual temperament of the ancestors whose songs, dances, and art were a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed" (1). Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, Harrison writes, was begun in part as a response to Wilson's speech.
Harrison's own writing provides other antecedents to...