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Chapter 29 - August Wilson’s Generative Gem for Reembodiment, Materiality, and Migratory Transformation

from Part IV - Critical and Comparative Contexts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2025

By
Iyanna Hamby
Edited by
Khalid Y. Long  and
Isaiah Matthew Wooden
Khalid Y. Long
Affiliation:
Howard University, Washington DC
Isaiah Matthew Wooden
Affiliation:
Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania
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Summary

This chapter situates August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean as a catalyst for emerging theoretical conversations such as Saidiya Hartman’s theory of critical fabulation and archival journey on the Recovery, and contemporary artistic undertakings like Vessels that mutually reckon with the utility of the vessel. In so doing, it explores how the Black body acts as a vessel for the facilitation of a radical poetics. The chapter asks: Can an analysis of the vessel position Wilson in these embodied and urgent contexts?

Keywords

August WilsonAmerican Century CycleAunt EsterGem of the OceanAfropessimismSaidiya HartmanFrank WildersonVessels
Type
Chapter
Information
August Wilson in Context , pp. 356 - 367
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Further Reading

Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).Google Scholar
Hartman, Saidiya, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.Google Scholar
Selmon McCormick, Stacy, Staging Black Fugitivity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019).Google Scholar
McKittrick, Katherine, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).Google Scholar
Wilderson, Frank B. III, Afropessimism (New York: Liverlight Publishing, 2021).Google Scholar

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