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    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"
    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"
    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"
    Ebook40 pages25 minutes

    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman," 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
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781535822312
    A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman" - Gale

      2

      Dutchman

      Amiri Baraka

      1964

      Introduction

      Dutchman, Amiri Baraka’s shocking one-act play was first presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre in New York City in March, 1964. It won the Obie Award for best off-Broadway play, putting Baraka, who was actively contributing to five other plays at the time, into the public limelight. He was still in his Bohemian phase but would the following year divorce his white (Jewish) wife, move to Harlem, and change his name from LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka indicating his new Black Nationalist leanings. Dutchman, written just before this move, is a transitional piece. It carries elements of the dadaist poetry of his Bohemian stage, anti-racist sentiments, and the radical black consciousness-raising that would characterize much of his later work.

      Dutchman is an emotionally charged and highly symbolic version of the Adam and Eve story, wherein a naive bourgeois black man is murdered by an insane and calculating white seductress, who is coldly preparing for her next victim as the curtain comes down. The emotionally taut, intellectual verbal fencing between Clay (the black Adam) and Lula (a white Eve) spirals irrevocably to the symbolic act of violence that will apparently repeat itself over and over again. Baraka’s play is one of mythical proportions, a ritual drama that has a sociological purpose: to galvanize his audience into revolutionary action. Dutchman initially played to primarily white audiences, until Baraka moved it to a Harlem theater that he founded in order to reach, and to educate, his intended audience of the black bourgeoisie. Ironically, the Harlem audiences labeled it a white-hating play and the play closed in Harlem due to lack of revenue. But Baraka was now fully established as the roaring black literary lion, and he continued his mission of black consciousness raising through a prolific output of drama, poetry, essays, and political activity.

      Author Biography

      Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones on October 7, 1934, to Anna Lois Russ Jones, a social worker, and Coyt Jones, a postal supervisor. Called LeRoi, he grew up in Newark, New Jersey, a gifted student who graduated from high school early and won a scholarship to Rutgers University. He transferred to the predominantly African American Howard University after only one year, however, because he felt too much like an outsider at Rutgers. But he felt equally uneasy at

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