Approaches to Africa: The Poetics of Reconnection August Wilson’s Fences and Joe Turner Come and Gonne

Abstract

August Wilson’s Fences (1985) and Joe Turner’s Come and Gonne (1986) highlight the metaphoric relationship between African American history and the black body. Wilson extensively explores static and dynamic relationships to that history and, by refocusing on the black body as a locus for a new and dynamic metaphoric of African American history. He attempts to reformulate the African American poetics of Memory. Tracing both personal and racial history, the poetics of memory functions as a dialectic of recalling reminiscent of the African American tradition of call and response. Bringing the past into the present as a vivid and active component of people’s daily lives, it also attacks the linearity of time and, as a result, often leaves people trapped in a sense of futility...