Related Papers
THE COMPLICATED INTERFACES OF SYMBOLISM AND MYTH IN DUTCHMAN
Saddik جوهر Gohar صديق
Approaching Dutchman as either a symbolic or a religious allegory, critics have given little attention to the play's revolutionary dimensions and its ethno-political motifs which were integral to LeRoi Jones' evolving black aesthetics in the sixties. This presentation will discuss the religious and symbolic motifs of the play and link them with its sociopolitical background as well as the racial conflict between whites and blacks in America. It will also clarify the revolutionary themes of Dutchman which brought about the evolution of Jones' black aesthetics of resistance in the sixties. Moreover, the paper will analyze Jones' anti-white and anti-middle class Negro attitudes as reflected in Dutchman in order to locate the play within the black literature of resistance.
Modern Drama
Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race
1997 •
George Piggford
ASAT-JAST
A Rereading and Repositioning of Roles in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman
2019 •
Sultan Komut
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.
On Race, Violence and the Defiance of Traditional Gender Roles in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman
CLRI CONTEMPORARY LITERARY REVIEW INDIA On Violence, Race and the Defiance of Traditional Gender Roles in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman by Arnab Chatterjee
2016 •
Dr. Arnab Chatterjee
The construction of gender and the resultant 'roles' that it plays or is meant to play in a semiotic system has garnered much challenging vistas of critical investigation in feminist and queer theory. Following Butler's famous remark that "gender is performative" and does not have a pristine, transcendental identity of its own, much of the debate lies on the 'porous' areas that outline gender. Thus to be aggressive is masculine and docility being a hallmark of feminine charm is no longer tenable. Following this cue, this proposed paper would try to critically investigate this act of "straddling" across gender and sexual 'norms' from the vantage point of Amiri Baraka's acclaimed play Dutchman (1964). Racially oriented, and having a somewhat Pinteresque setting, the play shows two characters, the white female seductress Lula and the black victim Clay engaged in a game of power and the gradual effort to wrest a territory of their own, that reverses the traditional notions of gender performativity. Lula would go to any limits to be as aggressive as she can be, to the point of being a white murderess as the play shows, while Clay would initially be more concerned saving his petite, middle class bourgeoisie image and would resort to violence on a mere verbal level only in the last resort. The play is interesting not only because it portrays race relations in the then racist America, but also because the characters while beleaguered by questions of race and ethnicity perform their gender specific 'roles' in a way that may be of interest to feminists and queer theorists who would increasingly refuse to assign a defining 'center' to these terms.
SAVAS PATSALIDIS: Discipline and Punish: The Case of Baraka's "Dutchman" : North Dakota Quarterly (1989): 224-35.
Savas Patsalidis
Written in an especially turbulent period, when the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa filled the firmament with their apocalyptic prophecies, Dutchman stands out as Baraka‟s earliest and most unsettling response to the absolutist rhetoric of white ideology....
Manifestations of the Flying Dutchman: On Materializing Ghosts and (Not) Remembering the Colonial Past
Agnes Andeweg
This article investigates remediations of the Flying Dutchman legend – the story about a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans forever – in English and Dutch sources from the nineteenth and twentieth century. It explains the popularity and wide dissemination of the Flying Dutchman by interpreting the story, firstly, within the context of Anglo-Dutch colonial competition and, secondly, within the context of new technological developments, paying particular attention to the moments when the Flying Dutchman seems to lose its spectral character and becomes a real object or person. Of the two interpretations of the spectre put forward here – staging colonial history versus staging technological advancement –, the second seems to be the more dominant throughout the history of continuous remediation and adaptation of the Flying Dutchman. When the ghost materializes, temporality is reversed: the focus shifts from the present's fraught relation to the past to the present's imagination of the future. In the dissemination of the figure itself however the colonial dimension is often still present.
The Persistence of the American Myth: (Re)visions in Art and Visual Culture; Acta Philologica 49, 2016, p. 321-330.
Filip Lipinski
The paper concerns the condition of selected aspects of American mythology in contemporary (from the 1960s till today) art and visual culture. Using specific examples and referring to theorists of American culture such as Sacvan Bercovitch, I argue that, despite varied strategies of appropriation and deconstructive critique of American ideals of freedom, equality and the country's special role in the world, epitomized in the notion of American exceptionalism, the basic structure of the myth, due to its inextricable connection with American history, still persists as an important platform of action and a frame of reference. I analyze a selection of works referring to the Stars and Stripes, the Western film genre as well as the architecture of the post-9/11 World Trade Center, which both reveal the underlying structure of the myth, denaturalizing it, and a strong, continued attachment to it in the 20 th and 21 st century United States. The notion of the American myth and its cultural construction is familiar and blurry, so ubiquitous and disseminated in culture that it became difficult to grasp as an object of precise analysis. Its longevity, enduring relevance and the special kind of attachment to it among Americans of different political factions originated from the fact of being both the underpinning of the construction of American national identity, crucial in the 19 th century when the United States was forming its geopolitical shape, and of American global imperialism in the 20 th century. Founded on the notion of " American exceptionalism, " introduced by Alexis de Tocqueville, with its defining democratic and egalitarian values, it received its diverse concretizations and iterations in the form of both specific economic and political policies and cultural production in literature, film and other visual arts. The last aspect will become of special interest here. If, as the American musician and songwriter Gill Scott-Heron sang " the revolution will not be televised, " the American myth, in its diverse concretizations, has been, indeed, televised – not just appearing on TV but visualized at a distance, disseminated across the US borders, in the form of painting, prints, photographs and finally film and television to be accepted as an attractive narrative carrying certain values and history, gaining global prominence by fantasmatically colonializing minds of masses, including non-Americans. As a result, the American myth can be generally viewed as a kind of an
the Black Theatre Review
“A [B]lack Baudelaire”: Linguistic Panic and Symbolism in Amiri Baraka’s 1960s Life and Work
2022 •
Shadow Zimmerman
journal of Beat Studies
Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman
2020 •
Allan Johnston
When Amiri Baraka's play Dutchman was produced in 1964, it marked a moment of personal, literary, and social transition for the playwright and for society. At the personal level, the work signaled Baraka's distancing from the Beat bohemians he associated with and his movement toward Black Nationalism, a shift he would ultimately mark by divorcing Hettie Jones, his white wife, changing his name from LeRoi Jones to Imamu Amiri Baraka (he later dropped Imamu), and moving from Greenwich Village to Harlem before eventually returning to his native Newark, New Jersey. At the aesthetic/literary/social level, the work proved seminal in the developing Black Arts Movement as a way of expressing impatience with social change through the Civil Rights movement and an insistence that Black people should define their own cultural stance and aesthetics, and take charge of their own liberation/condition. The new volume Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman, published by the Modern Language Association (MLA) as part of its well-known Approaches to Teaching series, offers perspectives from professors and teachers at several universities on how to approach teaching this work that, as the back-page blurb puts it, "continues to speak to racial violence and inequality today." Regarding the editors, Matthew Calihman is an associate professor at Missouri State University.
The Power of Metaphor and Myth: Pandora's Box (2014)
Gerry Yokota
