ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how August Wilson’s play uses performance and black vernacular music practice to engage varying definitions of modernism across a series of cultural contexts. Wilson is most invested in contemplating African American modernism as its own distinct artistic tradition rooted in post-World War I history. Most immediately, Wilson is discernibly modernist for articulating his faith—both inside and outside of the play’s text—in the power of art to give form to the otherwise chaotic context of modern life. The chapter suggests that Wilson’s version of black modernism, in its theatricality and the space it clears for staging black musical performance, pushes well beyond the discursive limits of Baker’s reappraisal. Part of the “freshness” of Wilson’s approach to black modernism lies in a later, even more assertive validation of the previously underappreciated materials Baker celebrates in Brown’s Ma Rainey poem. Wilson’s instructions for the play’s staging help restate the open- endedness in spatial terms.
