• Performing Ancestry: Reading August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson as a Performative Neo-Slave Narrative
• Patrick Maley (bio)

The preservation and promotion, the propagation and rehearsal of the value of one’s ancestors is the surest way to a full and productive life

August Wilson¹

August Wilson considered remembering the struggles and triumphs of black American history stretching back into slavery of paramount importance to African-American community. He declared, “I stand myself and my art squarely on the self-defining ground of the slave quarters, and find the ground to be hallowed and made fertile by the blood and bones of the men and women who can be described as warriors on the cultural battlefield that affirmed their self-worth.”² The playwright said frequently that his own cultural history began with the initial arrival on American soil of American slaves, and he dedicated the performative power of his art to wrestling with how the complex legacy of that history influences black American community. His work in fact reveals a conviction that strong, productive African-American community must include dead ancestors, especially slaves, and he works toward constructing this community with a consistent stress on performance. When his characters perform for and with each other in song or ritual, they do so in such a way that attempts to invoke and commune with ancestral spirits. His plays attempt to do the same in theatres during performance. This impulse in Wilson aligns his work with the goals of neo-slave narratives, a genre that revisits the conventions of slave narratives in order to examine connections between contemporary and slave communities. Theorists associate the neo-slave narrative almost exclusively with novels, but Wilson demonstrates how conceptions of the form can benefit from serious consideration of drama. [End Page 59]

The neo-slave narrative prioritizes historical and aesthetic community. By depicting slavery and its legacy in contemporary literature, neo-slave narratives reveal an investment in exploring the connections between contemporary cultures and their slave ancestors. But that connection is not simply linear. Instead, neo-slave narratives posit an immediacy of the slave experience upon the contemporary landscape. Ultimately, neo-slave narratives seek to close the historical and cultural gap between their epochs and slavery, suggesting that enslaved Africans in America constitute an indispensable component of African-American community. Neo-slave narratives therefore seek fuller understanding of American black life and a more productive conception of contemporary community that includes the presence of historical forebears.

Since Bernard W. Bell coined the term in a study of novels, the critical tradition has identified neo-slave narratives primarily in fiction. When prominent critics like Bell, Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Valerie Smith, and others discuss neo-slave narratives, they refer almost exclusively to novels from the mid-sixties through today that redeploy conventions of the slave narrative genre originating in the late eighteenth century. Examining novels like Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), among others, theorists explore how contemporary authors appropriate and reinvigorate a historical form in order to examine African-American community and critique the condition of contemporary black subjectivity.

Among contemporary scholarship on the genre, besides Arlene R. Keizer’s interest in Derek Walcott, drama garners very little attention as neo-slave narrative.³ This could be because Bell’s originary conceptualization of the form comes within a study of novels, or because theorists are most interested in how contemporary novels emulate the form as well as the function of the slave narrative, or simply because the very notion of narrative presupposes certain generic constrictions. But certainly the concept of contemporary literature revisiting the conventions of the slave narrative invites exploration of a variety of forms. Even Rushdy leaves room for generic flexibility when defining the neo-slave narrative: “Neo-slave narratives are modern or contemporary fictional works substantially concerned with depicting the experience of the effects of New World slavery” (my emphasis).⁴ In his choice of the term fictional [End Page 60] works rather than novels or stories or something similar, Rushdy betrays an awareness that contemporary literary engagement with the effects of New World slavery can come in a...

• 表演祖先：阅读奥古斯特·威尔逊的《钢琴课》作为表演性的新奴隶叙事
• 帕特里克·马利（生物）

保存和促进，传播和演练祖先的价值是实现充实和多产生活的最可靠方法

奥古斯特·威尔逊¹

一个月‧日威尔逊认为记住斗争和拉伸回至关重要奴役的非洲裔社区美国黑人历史的胜利。他宣称：“我和我的艺术立足于奴隶区的自给自足的土地上，并找到了可以被男人和女人的鲜血和骨头所赐予的土地并使其变得肥沃的土地，这些男人和女人可以被形容为战士。肯定了自己的自我价值的文化战场。” ^2个这位剧作家经常说，他自己的文化历史始于最初进入美国奴隶的美国土地，他将自己艺术的表演力与该历史的复杂遗产如何影响美国黑人社区作斗争。实际上，他的工作表明了一种信念，即强大，富有生产力的非裔美国人社区必须包括死去的祖先，尤其是奴隶，并且他致力于建立一个始终关注表现的​​社区。当他的角色在歌曲或仪式中为彼此表演时，他们以尝试唤起祖先精神并与之交流的方式来进行表演。他的戏剧试图在表演期间在剧院里做同样的事情。威尔逊的冲动使他的工作与新奴隶叙事的目标保持一致，一种流派，它重新审视了奴隶叙述的惯例，以便研究当代和奴隶社区之间的联系。理论家几乎把新奴隶的叙述与小说联系在一起，但是威尔逊证明了形式的概念如何可以从认真考虑戏剧中受益。[完第59页]

新奴隶的叙事优先考虑历史和审美共同体。通过描述奴隶制及其在当代文学中的遗产，新奴隶叙事揭示了对探索当代文化与其奴隶祖先之间联系的投资。但是，这种连接不只是线性的。取而代之的是，新奴隶的叙事将奴隶的经历即刻化为当代风景。最终，新奴隶的叙事试图弥合其时代与奴隶制之间的历史和文化鸿沟，这表明在美国，被奴役的非洲人是非裔美国人社区不可或缺的组成部分。因此，新奴隶的叙事寻求对美国黑人生活的更全面理解，以及对包括历史前辈在内的当代社区的一种更有生产力的观念。

自从贝尔纳·W·贝尔（Bernard W. Bell）在小说研究中创造了这个名词以来，批评传统就主要在小说中发现了新奴隶的叙事。当贝尔，阿什拉夫·阿·拉什迪，瓦莱丽·史密斯等著名评论家讨论新奴隶叙事时，他们几乎都提到从六十年代中期到今天的小说，这些小说重新部署了源自十八世纪末期的奴隶叙事流派。在审查玛格丽特·沃克（Margaret Walker）的《禧年》（1966），亚历克斯·海利（Alex Haley）的《根源》（1976）和托尼·莫里森（Toni Morrison）的《心爱的人》（1987）等小说之后，理论家们探索了当代作家如何适应和重振历史形态，以便研究非裔美国人社区并对其进行批判。当代黑人主体性的状况。

在当代流派的学术研究中，除了阿琳·R·凯泽尔（Arlene R. Keizer）对德里克·沃尔科特（Derek Walcott）的兴趣外，戏剧作为新奴隶的叙事很少受到关注。³这可能是因为贝尔对形式的起源概念化是在小说研究中进行的，或者是因为理论家对当代小说如何模仿形式以及奴隶叙事的功能最感兴趣，或者仅仅是因为叙事的前提是前提某些通用限制。但是，可以肯定的是，当代文学概念重新审视了奴隶叙事的惯例，从而引发了对多种形式的探索。甚至在定义新奴隶叙事时，拉什迪（Rushdy）也为通用灵活性留出了空间：“新奴隶叙事是现代或当代小说作品基本上与描绘新世界奴隶制的影响经验有关”（我强调）。⁴ Rushdy在选择小说 [End Page 60] 作品而不是小说或故事等类似作品时，背叛了一种认识，即当代文学对新世界奴隶制的影响会在...