August Wilson과 미국 흑인극 정전형성 = August Wilson and the Formation of the Canon in African American Drama

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

At the 1996 annual conference of the Theater Communication Group, a national association of regional theaters, August Wilson was invited to deliver a keynote speech. Wilson's speech turned out to be a shock to many members of the audience including the black writers and theater practitioners. In the speech Wilson issued a warning to the effect that Black theater has been a target for cultural imperialists who seek to propagate their ideas about the world as the only valid ideas. Not a few people expressed doubts and criticisms about the apparent double standard of the speech. Robert Brustein published an article of direct refute about the speech in a magazine and then had a heated debate with Wilson about the issue at New York City's Town Hall. Wilson was
known to have benefited the most from the multiculturalist policy of the mainstream theater world. His plays have been successful on Broadway, the center of the Great White Way, and he is now criticizing many black
writers and theater practitioners just because they are doing the same thing as him. Why? My essay began as an attempt to investigate the historical background of Wilson's controversial speech.
Black Americans have always written plays and put on performances since the arrival of the first blacks on the continent. The problem was that their existence and activities have been thoroughly ignored, or excluded from the attention of the white society until almost the 1960's, when the Black Arts Movement changed the fundamental concept of the black arts in America. The Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 30's was the first step for blacks to awake their artistic spirit and create truly black arts in the new continent. It was when W.E.B. Du Bois, then editor of The Crisis magazine, launched a drama contest, and started the Krigwa Little Theater Movement to encourage the blacks involved in the theater movement to write and perform. Du Bois was a radical sociologist who argued for a fight against the white oppression, while Alain Locke emphasized the necessity for black folk arts. Du Bois called for a warrior or a hero as a dramatic character, but the Locke school believed that the artist ought to find the essence of blackness in the ordinary life of common blacks. The history of black theater and drama has been the history of a dialectic struggle between the two opposing
schools.
LeRoi Jones was the representative theorist and author for the Black Arts Movement in the 1960's and 70's. Jones refused to remain a writer and called for an all out war against the white oppression. He frequently
expressed his political views about the racial condition in America. Jones considered the Aristotelian aesthetics to be outdated and useless for the betterment and healing of the seriously divided and deeply hurt
communities in America. If the theatre was important for him, it was as long as it could contribute to the changing of the people and the world. His aesthetics of drama resembles the ideas in ‘The Theater of Cruelty’ which Antonin Artaud formulated in The Theater and its Double.
Early drafts of Wilson's plays were consistent in their inclusion of extensive storytelling, non-realistic dramatic elements, and a sprawling narrative. But by the time Wilson's plays reached Broadway, they became much more akin to traditional western drama. All of Wilson's dramas have been strongly influenced by the American process of play development as a result of his visits to various institutions such as New Dramatists, the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, the Yale Repertory Theatre, and the Goodman Theatre. It was a process in which new plays were open to significant professional and public review in the course of their creation. The step-by-step process of revision Wilson applied to each of his plays resulted in a melding of his original artistic impulses with mainstream theatrical conventions and it revealed his creative response to the very commercial system within which pla

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 문제의 제기
• Ⅱ. 흑인연극의 시작
• Ⅲ. 투쟁을 위한 예술인가 예술을 위한 예술인가?：뒤보이스(Du Bois) vs. 로크(Locke)
• Ⅳ. 1960, 70년대의 흑인예술운동(Black Arts Movement)
• Ⅴ. 연극운동의 실제
• Ⅵ. 다시 윌슨에 관하여
• 참고문헌