Locating Cultural Roots and Identity in Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.

Abstract

• The research paper seeks to examine the black people’s struggle to locate their cultural roots and collective identity in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by analyzing the actions of the protagonist of the play, Herald Loomis, a representative black. It basically surveys the issues of identity, dislocation, and slavery through the close reading of the play under the theoretical modality of cultural studies, especially from the theories of Kenneth Womack, Homi K. Bhabha, Antonio Gramski, Raymond Williams, Cornel West, and other major cultural theorists. The work considers how the blacks were deprived of their cultural practice after the ‘Great Migration’ in America in the 1910s, and how the blacks strive to regain the lost identity in the play. The research finding is that August Wilson readdresses the omission of the identity of the African Americans and embraces their African cultural practices to regain their identity by stimulating the blacks to set themselves free from western cultural and theological domination.