African American Studies Commons^™

Stepping Beyond The Veil And Breaking The Pittsburgh Cycle: The American Dream, Otherness, And Generational Trauma In August Wilson's Cycle Plays, Kaitlin Stellingwerf

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle is a series of ten plays that aims to “amend, to explore, and to add to our African consciousness and our African aesthetic” (Wilson qtd. in Gantt 5). Each play is set in a different decade but all share incredibly similar protagonists; all of them are African American men in their mid to late adulthood. The stories are separated by years but all articulate the generational trauma embedded in the African American consciousness in the twentieth century. Wilson’s plays span between the generations of African Americans living in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation to a …