Solipsistic breakthroughs or stymying collectives? Historical duels in August Wilson’s Radio Golf.

Abstract

August Wilson’s place among the most significant chroniclers of African American history through the medium of fictional dramatic narratives is certainly not in doubt. Wilson consummated this through a project to write a cycle of ten plays, each one representing a significant moment in every decade of African American experience during the 20th Century. August Wilson’s ten-play cycle constantly dramatises the historical cross-roads at which African Americans have found themselves as they contemplate which path to take on a ceaseless quest to find prosperity and establish enduring identities of the self in post-emancipation America. Wilson’s plays often set up duels between antagonistic forces that represent the conflict between retaining old ground and identities of the past, and the imperative to break with the past and start afresh. Coming at the end of Wilson’s ten-play cycle, Radio Golf most poignantly represents these historical duels in ways that are reminiscent of the crisis of consciousness that has persistently assailed African Americans in their quest to make the right historical choices during the 20th Century. This crisis of consciousness, so aptly described by William Du Bois as a form of ‘double consciousness’ makes it difficult for African Americans to make an easy choice at these historical cross-roads. Wilson’s Radio Golf, presents this duel using characters who dramatise the conflict between the incipient solipsism of the American Dream and its attendant possibilities for capitalist breakthroughs on the one hand, and on the other a sense of collective history that could potentially stymy individual progress.