DIASPORA, CITIZENSHIP, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF IDENTITY IN THE DRAMATURGY OF AMIRI BARAKA AND AUGUST WILSON

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DIASPORA, CITIZENSHIP, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF IDENTITY IN THE DRAMATURGY OF AMIRI BARAKA AND AUGUST WILSON

Abstract:

The question of reinventing African American citizenship and cultural identity is a historical process that situates him as a victim of forced diaspora that saw him unsolicited carted into the decks of slave ships and transported across the vast Atlantic ocean to the New World to serve as free labor for the economic exploitation of the new imperial and colonial powers and their capitalist collaborators. The struggle for identity, citizenship, freedom, and recognition began with captivity which stripped the African slave of his hitherto freeman status. Subjugated as a slave, he is repudiated and consigned to lower caste status as a result of the endowment of his skin co-lour. Prior to the 1950s however, African Americans’ effort centered on the drive for freedom, sometimes eliciting calls for integration and assimilation into the mainstream culture. In what became unprecedented move, the 1950s Civil Rights Movement initiated the most organized and most formidable social movement in the history of the United States which boldly confronted the nagging issue of citizenship and political franchise for the African American. Hitherto, all cultural and literary productions dwelt largely on inklings towards assimilation and integration into the mainstream culture. This study therefore sets out to explore the dramatically of Baraka and August Wilson in order to articulate how the issue of diaspora, citizenship, and identity are reinvented, and on what geographic locales and spaces. While Wilson concerns himself with the intrigues of inter-racial and intra-racial relationship of black and white, Baraka dwells largely on the doctrines of both the Black Power and the Black Arts Movements in the construction of citizenship and identity. This is an almost exclusively library research work. But because dearth of recent materials in the areas of study, the researchers also has to dwell largely on the internet. Findings arising from this study show that for the African American to succeed in constructing acceptable citizenship and the reinventing of proud racial identity, he must develop communal and community consciousness that are ethically rooted as a trope for survival and the exercise of rights that ensure and guarantee broad base participation. Even this community consciousness has not been easy to formulate because of obstacles that have been placed by institutional racism. Yet, against all odds, the African American has made giant strides in asserting citizenship and befitting identity.

DIASPORA, CITIZENSHIP, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF IDENTITY IN THE DRAMATURGY OF AMIRI BARAKA AND AUGUST WILSON

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