en MUSIC AS AN EXPRESSION OF CULTURAL IDENTITY: AUGUST WILSON’S DRAMATIC REFLECTIONS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART
  • Beşe,  Ahmet
    ATATURK UNIVERSITY OF ERZURUM, TURKEY
Abstract
Music has become ‘a way of understanding life’ for African-American community in which they masked their souls in their painful history in theU.S.They expressed their faith, feelings, joys, and pains sometimes implicitly and sometimes through implied versions. The main aim of this paper is to expose the cultural identity of African-American characters in their music. Music and its unique capability, amongst many other things, can introduce a reservoir of expressivity, and establish boundaries between creative art and cultural identity. The deployment of cultural identity through black musical expression underscores the connection and complexities of African-American sense of self and place inAmerica. AugustWilsonmakes use of the African-American music, musicians and musical instruments in order to redefine cultural identity in his prominent plays. This study suggests that there exist a close connection between music filled with African- American cultural experience of art and cultural identity, as reflected in earlier plays of August Wilson