MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

August Wilson wrote the “Pittsburgh Cycle” to “amend, to explore, and to add to our African consciousness and our African aesthetic” (Gantt 5). Wilson’s ten plays depicts the African American experience over the course of the twentieth century from emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement. Wilson’s African American male protagonists together tell the story of the changing symptoms of what Frantz Fanon calls “the neurosis of blackness,” a traumatic condition embedded within the psyche of the “black subject.” Wilson’s protagonists articulate a racial struggle beyond generations: each character demonstrating both generational trauma and individual struggle. Wilson’s protagonists seem to all struggle with identity as they measure themselves inadequate against white economic ideals in a simultaneous struggle to keep their African heritage. Many of Wilson’s protagonists are paranoid, anxious, and traumatized by psychological standards; much of this anxiety manifests in aggression, ostracism, and ultimately, criminality. The Pittsburgh Cycle creates an artistic depiction of the troubling foundations of modern racial activism such as the Black Lives Matter Movement: the black subject has been typified as an inferior criminal. The Pittsburgh Cycle articulates that these characters are not simply brutes, but instead, they are complicated psychological cases of trauma. Wilson’s subjects give deeper insight into the symptoms of DuBois’s “double consciousness,” as his characters’ identity struggles often lead them to their own demise.