Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black, Blues on stage
Characters want your attention
Don’t turn the page
Poems and plays
Fences, MA Rainey’s Black Bottom & Two Trains Running
Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black & disabled, he had his reasons
A different kind of Porgy
Black, Blues on stage
Characters want your attention
Don’t turn the page
Poems and plays
Fences, MA Rainey’s Black Bottom & Two Trains Running
Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black & disabled, he had his reasons
A different kind of Porgy
Thank you Stacie McCormick
To put my thoughts in ink
You wrote what I wanted to get out
Your essay I want to shout
“Through Gabriel’s and Hambone’s performances, we can see how August Wilson writes disability into the Black radical tradition as both characters reconfigure the aesthetic as a mode of inhabiting and improvising the strictures of their social conditions, thereby augmenting cultural scripts of blackness and disability.”
From your brilliant essay,
August Wilson and the Anti-spectacle of Blackness and Disability in Fences and Two Trains Running
To describe his characters, who are disabled in some form, Wilson coined the term, “spectacle characters.”
Black, Blues on stage
Characters want your attention
Don’t turn the page
Poems and plays
Fences, MA Rainey’s Black Bottom & Two Trains Running
Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black & disabled, he had his reasons
A different kind of Porgy
Black, Blues on stage
Characters want your attention
Don’t turn the page
Poems and plays
From your brilliant essay,
August Wilson and the Anti-spectacle of Blackness and Disability in Fences and Two Trains Running
To describe his characters, who are disabled in some form, Wilson coined the term, “spectacle characters.”
Disability Studies need to study August Wilson
There are so many reasons
Black life, Black music
Thank you Stacie McCormick
To put my thoughts in ink
You wrote what I wanted to get out
Your essay I want to shout
The question, will Black & Disability Studies listen
This is the only beginning and there’s no ending
August Wilson wrote me in
Putting disability into Black culture
No either or
Fought for the stories of “spectacle characters.”
Not of the other
But within the Black community
With the state looking to incarcerate
The power of the gaze
Not only the White gaze
Under eugenic gaze
To put Gabriel and Hambone in the disability gaze
Within the Black community
Did Wilson unveil Black ableism
In the nineteen seventies
Need more study
Another example of Black kripping the Black Radical Tradition
Black, Blues on stage
Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black & Disabled academic scholars don’t turn the page
Fences, MA Rainey’s Black Bottom & Two Trains Running
Spectacle Characters of August Wilson
Black & disabled, he had his reasons
I’ll include all of this in my dissertation
