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- Title
'The Colored Man Can't Fix Nothing with the Law': Carceral Spaces in August Wilson's The Piano Lesson.
- Authors
Wardi, Anissa
- Abstract
August Wilson's 'Pittsburgh Cycle,' a play written for each decade of the twentieth century, reveals an ongoing engagement with the nature of race, crime, and punishment. Almost none of the male characters in Wilson's cycle is imprisoned during the course of the play in which he appears, yet most share the experience of imprisonment, and thus carceral places occupy an important rhetorical space in his dramaturgy. Specifically, in The Piano Lesson, Wilson casts prison as metaphor and metonym of modern-day bondage, historicizing social forms of control that have circumscribed the social, civil, and legal rights of the African American community.
- Subjects
PITTSBURGH Cycle (Theatrical production); RACE in literature; CRIME in literature; PUNISHMENT in literature; AFRICAN Americans
- Publication
Journal of African American Studies, 2013, Vol 17, Issue 4, p506
- ISSN
1559-1646
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12111-012-9236-z