MUSIC AS AN EXPRESSION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY: AUGUST WILSON’S DRAMATIC REFLECTIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART
MUSIC AS AN EXPRESSION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY: AUGUST WILSON’S DRAMATIC REFLECTIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART

Summary/Abstract: Music has become ‘a way of understanding life’ for African-American community in which they masked their souls in their painful history in the U.S. They expressed their faith, feelings, joys, and pains sometimes implicitly and sometimes through implied versions. The main aim of this paper is to expose the cultural identity of African-American characters in their music. Music and its unique capability, amongst many other things, can introduce a reservoir of expressivity, and establish boundaries between creative art and cultural identity. The deployment of cultural identity through black musical expression underscores the connection and complexities of African-American sense of self and place in America. August Wilson makes use of the African-American music, musicians and musical instruments in order to redefine cultural identity in his prominent plays. This study suggests that there exist a close connection between music filled with African- American cultural experience of art and cultural identity, as reflected in earlier plays of August Wilson2.

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