| Sumario: | This article examines how to approach the teaching of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." With its powerful and haunting evocations of the Middle Passage from Africa to America, his remembrance of oppressive racial servitude, his invocation of spiritual passion in the face of overwhelming circumstances, "Joe Turner" is perhaps the most spiritual and non-linear piece within Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays. Consequently, it offers certain pedagogical challenges. This article argues that, at its core, the play functions ritualistically, as the central figure in the action, Herald Loomis, moves from self-destruction and stagnation to liberation by taking the self-defining, racially significant, spiritual act of bleeding for himself. Wilson sets this play in 1911, a time not that far removed from slavery, in which he feels that African retentions and rituals were palpable in African American experiences. In working with this play with an undergraduate class or graduate course, the article argues, it is critical to examine with the students how ritual operates in the play, to determine the ritual action of the play, and to analyse how Africa is ritualized and how such symbolic enactments inform Wilson's re-working of African American history during this period of the Great Migration.
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