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A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship"
A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship"
A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship"
Ebook36 pages23 minutes

A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship"

By Gale and Cengage

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A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 3, 2016
ISBN9781535833332
A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship"

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    Book preview

    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Slave Ship" - Gale

    1

    Slave Ship

    Amiri Baraka

    1967

    Introduction

    Amiri Baraka’s play Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant was first produced at the Spirit House theater in Newark, New Jersey, in 1967, and first published in 1969, by Jihad, the publishing house founded by Baraka himself. The play has been noted for its successful embodiment of the politics of black nationalism, the aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement, and the principals of revolutionary theater put forth by Baraka through his founding of the Black Repertory Theater in Harlem in 1965.

    Slave Ship is a one-act play that takes place during distinct historical experiences in African-American history: aboard a slave ship during the Middle Passage from Africa to America, during a plantation-era uprising, and in the era of the civil rights movement. Baraka’s play utilizes the representation of African-American history as a means of forging a communal African-American identity through the preservation of African cultural roots. The use of music throughout the play is central to this theme of African-American cultural identity and communal solidarity. Critics have noted the use of music in conjunction with audience participation in a communal dance to create a ritualistic drama through which theater is intended to inspire political action.

    Author Biography

    Floyd Gaffney, in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, has compared Amiri Baraka (also known as LeRoi Jones or Imamu Amiri Baraka) to W. E. B. Dubois and Richard Wright as one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and persistent social and moral critics of black experience in America. Baraka’s political and literary career can be divided into three separate phases: a Beat Movement poet in the 1950s, a black nationalist poet, dramatist, essayist, and music historian in the 1960s, and a Marxist/ Socialist writer and activist in the

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