A Rereading and Repositioning of Roles in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

Year 2019, Issue: 51, 49 - 71, 01.11.2019

Sultan Komut Bakınç

Abstract

Amiri Baraka’s well-known and both vastly praised and criticized
play Dutchman is a primary example of Revolutionary Theater,
which Baraka conceptualizes as a theater that “forces” its audience
to confront the realities of social injustice, and “accuse” and “attack”
its practitioners. In this sense, Dutchman is a model text of Baraka’s
compulsion toward destruction through art. This article argues that the
prevalent view in the scholarship on this play reduces Clay and Lula as
victim and victimizer. This article aims to present these characters in a
postmodernist light, as more complex and less stereotyped. Thus, they
can be seen as having equally the potential to change and the potential
to destroy (themselves and/or the society). In the final analysis, Baraka
presents a true piece of Revolutionary Theater in Dutchman: powerful,
accusatory and destructive.

Keywords

Amiri Baraka, American Literature, American Poetry, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Dutchman, Revolutionary Theatre, Myths, Intertextuality, Deconstruction

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