Abstract
This chapter examines how August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean might serve as a counter-statement to Plato’s Republic where disease comes to figure the political ills of an embodied city (polis) requiring philosophical interventions/ healing. Gem of the Ocean is the first play (but not the first produced on stage) in Wilson’s “Centenary” or “Pittsburgh” cycle of ten plays chronicling the African experience in America for each decade of the twentieth century. Over the course of the play, Wilson scripts both the collapse of an American social contract and the potential for its repair. In the first section of the chapter, Wilson’s dramatic project is shown to include the invention and performance of a ritual to counter the magic of the collapsing “West” and the ritualized readings that symbolically support it (sometimes in the name of Socrates or Plato). In the second section, Wilson’s project is compared to Wole Soyinka’s powerful return to ritual and myth in order to identify to what extent Wilson may address the concerns of Soyinka’s critics. Finally, when sharpened against Soyinka’s critics,Wilson’s project appears as a call for and the creation of a new universal (one not fueled by collapse) when other terms for the universal have been exhausted.
