"Theater scholar and critic Harry J. Elam, Jr., interprets Wilson's plays in relation to concepts of memory and history, culture and resistance, and race and representation, arguing that Wilson seeks to reevaluate the past in order to understand the present. Elam also places Wilson's dramatic work in the context of contemporary African American literature, and looks at the function of music in Wilson's plays and in African American history. The book also explores the important but often overlooked ways in which Wilson incorporates African mythology into his portrait of twentieth-century African American history."--Jacket.