42 Copyright © Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures ISSN 1923-1555[Print] ISSN 1923-1563[Online] www.cscanada.net www.cscanada.org Space in August Wilson’s Fences Hossein Pirnajmuddin 1,* ; Shirin Sharar Teymoortash 2 1 English Department, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Assistant Professor of English Literature. 2 MA in English Literature. Email: sh_sh.teymoortash@yahoo.com * Corresponding author. Email: pirnajmuddin@fgn.ui.ac.ir Received 4 July 2011; accepted 22 July 2011 Abstract This paper tries to examine the idea or rather the metaphor of space in August Wilson’s Fences . It is argued that Wilson, mostly through the deft handling of the multivalent metaphor of ‘fences’, tends to inform his play spatially. In an attempt to refine our understanding of African-American experience the play offers different perspectives and delineates multiple experiential spaces (geographical, historical, socio-economic, racial, political, psychological, linguistic) marked off by all kinds of ‘fences’ (borders). As such, it is suggested, Wilson’s play exhibits a modernist aesthetic impulse. Key words: August Wilson; Fences ; space; aMetaphor; African-American experience Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Shirin Sharar Teymoortash (2011). Space in August Wilson’s Fences . Studies in Literature and Language, 3 (2), 42-47. Available from: URL: http://www.cscanada. net/index.php/sll/article/view/j.sll.1923156320110302.330 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/j.sll.1923156320110302.330 Despite the long history of African-American experience, extensive representation of black Americans in mainstream American literature, especially drama, is a relatively recent phenomenon. “It was not until the surge of interest in African American culture, thought, and experience during the 1960s that serious plays by and about African Americans reached mainstream theaters” (Abbotson, 2003, p.9). These dramatic productions, differing in terms of historical period as well as gender and intellectual modality of their dramatists, produce an almost heterogeneous body of narratives whose main concern can be regarded to contest prevalent forms of ethnic contingencies. Challenging the “knowledge” that assumes “traditional and canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four hundred- year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African- Americans in the United State,” they attempt to reveal that “the real or fabricated Africanist presence is crucial to the sense of Americanness” (Morrison, 2000, p.924). Furthermore, giving voice to the “marginal,” “silent” and “exotic” in the work of African-American dramatists is remarkably a response to the call of critics interested in the voice of the “Other,” especially Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s polemical question: “can a subaltern speak?” “These resisting writers,” as Margery Fee (1995) observes, “freeing themselves from the dominant ideology,” attempt “to change the current discursive formation” (p. 243-4). “Orphaned from their unique spatial and temporal context,” they claim “a space with history” or “a spatial history” for the Black’s invisible and illusory experience and history in America (Carter, 1995, p.376). One of the most distinguished black American dramatists in the latter half of the twentieth century is August Wilson (1945-2005). Wilson’s plays, reflecting upon many concerns of global anti-colonial writing from the 1950s onwards, manifestly depict his conscious attempt to achieve recognition within the current mainstream of the white American Drama. Keith Clark (2009), along with other critics celebrating Wilson’s genius, compares him with the great white dramatists such as O’Neill, Miller and Williams (p. 45). Wilson has, of course, enriched the American theatre’s heritage, but he has also questioned the basic terminology of difference, separation and exclusion. He is fundamentally concerned with the problem of “the ghettoization” of the black dramatists’ works and “the colonization of black theatre” (Bellamy, 1997, p.589) which is “the greatest travesty in American theatre today” (ibid., p.587). In Studies in Literature and Language Vol. 3, No. 2, 2011, pp. 42-47 DOI:10.3968/j.sll.1923156320110302.330