Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Çigdem Üsekes

Critical Essay by Çigdem Üsekes

SOURCE: Üsekes, Çigdem. “‘You Always under Attack’: Whiteness as Law and Terror in August Wilson's Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays.” American Dramas 10, no. 2 (summer 2001): 48-68.

In the following essay, Üsekes discusses Wilson's linking of whiteness with law and terror in his plays, suggesting that off-stage white characters symbolize a corrupt legal system that oppresses blacks.

August Wilson has won critical acclaim for his ambitious project of chronicling the African American experience in the twentieth century with a cycle of ten plays. But those critics who have applauded Wilson's black characters have neglected to pay attention to his equally intriguing, if less prominent, white characters, an oversight which has prevailed as one of the critical blind spots in Wilson scholarship.¹ Of course, because August Wilson's cycle of plays proposes to rewrite the white version of twentieth-century American history from an African American vantage point, it features and foregrounds black...
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