The Play
Glancing out the window of a subway train, a conservatively dressed black man of about twenty catches the eye of an attractive, thirtyish white woman who is standing on the platform. They exchange smiles. It is the sort of meaningless casual encounter, leading nowhere, that can leave a pleasant afterglow.
As the train moves on, the woman from the platform enters the car. She is wearing bright, skimpy summer clothes and sandals, and she carries a net bag full of paperback books, fruit, and other articles. A beautiful woman with long red hair, she is very daintily eating an apple.
Taking the seat beside the young man, she confirms that she is the woman he was just looking at, but she insists that his look carried more of a sexual charge than he is willing to admit. He denies that he was running his mind over her flesh, and he finds it “funny” that she has sought him out, as she says she has done, in response to his sexual aggression. She remarks that he looks as though he is trying to grow a beard; when he asks if he really looks like that, she replies that she lies a lot. This is the first of a series of verbal attacks, retreats, and evasions that will keep Clay for much of the play in a mixed state of curiosity, desire, and confusion.
His curiosity is aroused by her uncannily accurate guesses, if they are guesses, about himself, his associates, and his life. How does she know, for instance, that his friend Warren Enright is tall and skinny, with a phony English accent? She just figured he would know someone like that, she says.
She keeps Clay’s desire alive by a pattern of verbal and nonverbal sexual innuendo. She puts her hand on his thigh, then removes it, checking his reaction as she does. She asks if he would like to get involved with her. She is a beautiful woman, the young man replies; he would be a fool not to.
She confuses Clay by sudden swerves from whatever has become the topic of conversation. “I bet you’re sure you know what you’re talking about,” she says.
She offers him an apple. On the surface, this seems unrelated to the curiosity, desire, and confusion she arouses, but her comment that eating apples together is always the first step puts a sinister spin on this apparently innocent action.
She suggests that Clay invite her to a party. He playfully objects that he must first know her name. “Lena the Hyena,” she tells him, then attempts to guess his name. Gerald? Norman? Everett? She is sure it must be one of those “hopeless colored names” creeping out of New Jersey. It is Clay, he tells her. Her name, she now declares, is not Lena but Lula. That settled, Clay formally invites Lula to the party. Her reply, given her behavior to this point, sounds disconcertingly prim and conventional. She does not know him, she says.
In another of her turnabouts, she then insists that she knows him like the palm of her hand. The play of sexual titillation continues. She says that she knows him like the palm of the hand she uses to unbutton her dress, to remove her skirt.
Why, she wants to know, is Clay dressed in a three-button suit, with narrow shoulders? Why is he wearing a striped tie? Those clothes are for white men. Your grandfather was a slave, she reminds him. Clay corrects her: His grandfather was a night watchman. How does Clay see himself? Lula asks....
(This entire section contains 1212 words.)
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In college, Clay says, he considered himself to be a poet, a Baudelaire. Lula wants to know if Clay ever once thought he was a black nigger.
The word stuns Clay for a moment, but he decides to take it as a joke. He is willing to be called a black Baudelaire. When Lula tells Clay that he is a murderer, he is simply confused once again. Lula says in another swerve that they are both free of their history, or at least they can pretend to be.
As the second scene begins, Lula has established complete control. Clay kisses her neck and fingers as she enunciates promises of sexual delights to come. After the party, they will go to her house, where the real fun begins. Clay thinks he knows what the real fun is, but Lula says they will talk endlessly. About what, Clay wants to know. About the subject they have been talking about all along, Lula tells him: about his manhood.
Clay notices other passengers entering the car. As the scene proceeds, the car fills with passengers, both black and white. Do the other passengers frighten him? Lula asks. They should. After all, he is an escaped nigger.
Lula’s behavior becomes more outrageous, her language more provocative and obsessively racial. She calls Clay a middle-class black bastard, then says he is no nigger, just a dirty white man. When Clay tells her to be cool, she tells him that he must break out. He must not sit there dying, the way “they” want him to die.
Finally Clay does break out. He slaps Lula and forces her to sit. At this show of power, the other passengers avert their eyes and retreat behind their newspapers. Now Clay talks. Lula knows nothing, he says, understands nothing. She does not know “belly rub.” She does not know that when Bessie Smith sings the blues she is saying, “Kiss my black ass.” She does not understand that the great jazz musician Charlie Parker would never have played a note of music if he had just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. The poem of a black poet—Clay implicitly includes himself—is a substitute for the thrust of a knife. The simplest and sanest act for Clay as a black man would be to murder a white person: to murder Lula.
Clay draws back from so stark and lucid an act. Who needs it? He would rather be a fool, safe with his words. He offers a final warning, though. Do not preach the advantages of white Western rationalism to black people, for if you do, they will one day murder you and offer very rational explanations for what they have done.
When Lula says that she has heard enough, Clay prepares to leave. It appears as though they will not be acting out those erotic fantasies in which they have been indulging. As Clay bends to retrieve his belongings, Lula plunges a small knife into his chest. At her command, the other passengers, black and white, dispose of the dead body. They disembark at the next stop, leaving Lula alone in the car.
A young black man enters the car. When he sits a few seats behind Lula, she turns and gives him a long, slow look. Apparently in response, he drops the book he had begun to read. A black conductor does a sort of soft shoe dance down the aisle. He and the young man exchange greetings. The conductor tips his hat to Lula, who stares after him as he continues out of the car.
The Play
Dutchman is a short, two-scene play, the entire action of which takes place on a subway car traveling through the “underbelly of the city.” During the course of the play, Clay and Lula move from playful flirtation through angry accusation and self-revelation toward a violent confrontation that ends in ritualized murder.
At the start, Clay is seated alone on the subway car, reading a newspaper. He is dressed in a three-piece suit. Only his seat is visible, although more of the car is present. The shrieks and clattering of the subway car dominate, and the flickering lights of the subway tunnel and passing stations move past the car’s windows. As the play proceeds, the train sounds gradually lessen and disappear. After a while, the car stops at a station. Clay glances out the window but turns away in momentary embarrassment when he discovers that he is staring directly into a young white woman’s face. When he collects himself and turns back, the face has disappeared. The train resumes its movement, and Clay complacently returns to his newspaper. Then Lula enters the car and approaches him.
Lula is wearing a light summer dress and sandals. She sports bright red lipstick and carries a large net bag stuffed with paperback books, fruit, and a variety of other articles. She daintily eats an apple as she slowly approaches Clay’s seat and then expectantly hangs onto the strap next to him. When she catches his eye, she asks permission to sit and seductively lowers herself into the seat.
Lula initiates a playful conversation that implies romantic interest, but quickly reveals a disorienting knowledge of Clay’s family, friends, and behavior. She accurately describes his middle-class life-style and laughingly tells him that he looks “like death eating a soda cracker.” Clay assumes that Lula must know one of his friends, but Lula tells him that she simply knows his “type.” Clay plays along with Lula’s mockery because he sees her humor as flirtation, but her scorn for his assimilationist behavior and her knifelike cynicism become increasingly obvious. She tells him that everything he says is “wrong” and implies that he is living a lie to disguise a more aggressive and primitive nature: “You’re a murderer, Clay, and you know it.” Lula’s sarcastic hostility is tempered by her sexual provocation. She asks to accompany Clay to his friend’s party, and the play’s first scene ends with Lula declaring that they will pretend that they are outside of history, “anonymous beauties smashing along through the city’s entrails.” She yells “GROOVE!” as the stage goes black to end the first scene.
When the second scene of the play starts, other seats on the car are visible, and some are occupied. During the remainder of the scene, other passengers, black and white, enter the car and take seats until the car is nearly full.
Lula continues her description of the coming romantic evening in the comically false language of bad art, but her apparent playfulness is contradicted by her surprising assertion that their entire discussion has focused on Clay’s “manhood” and by her ominous prediction that when they make love later Clay will tell her that he loves her in order to keep her alive.
Lula’s narration becomes increasingly offensive, and Clay refuses to play along with her fantasy of him as an “escaped nigger” coming to her tenement apartment. When Clay resists, Lula becomes more aggressive, attempting to embarrass Clay by asking him to “belly rub” and then taunting him as “Uncle Thomas Woolly-Head.” Joined by a drunken passenger, she dances suggestively in the aisle of the car, deriding Clay for his supposed repression.
Her provocative behavior finally enrages Clay and he responds violently. He grabs Lula, clubs the drunk to the floor, throws Lula back in her seat, and slaps her. He then vents his anger in a monologue which expresses scorn of white liberals and defends his personal decision to avoid murder by assuming a middle-class life-style. He compares his actions to those of black artists and musicians who express their frustration and hatred disguised as art, calling their behavior a form of insanity that prevents them from sanely and rationally murdering white people.
As Clay finishes his tirade, Lula removes a knife from her bag and stabs him twice. At her command, the other passengers remove Clay’s body. She takes a small notebook from her bag, makes a notation, and sits down as the others leave the car. Before long another young black man enters the car and sits near Lula. She catches his eye and they exchange glances. The ritual of seduction and murder is evidently about to begin again. In a final ironic action, a comically stereotyped black conductor shuffles through the car, greets the young black man as “brother,” and continues walking as the curtain falls.
Places Discussed
*New York City
*New York City. Literally an “overdrop” for the play, the city serves both as the realistic urban setting for highly charged racial dynamics between black and white Americans in the 1960’s and as Amiri Baraka’s mythic and symbolic setting for a critique of black consciousness and the Black Arts movement.
Subway tunnels
Subway tunnels. Subterranean passageways for the subway trains that symbolize places in which social and psychological realities are exposed in their true terms through interactions between characters moving underneath the surface of American culture. Below ground, violent truths of American history erupt into stark view, with profound consequences for particular human beings who cannot escape to the surface and its delusions of safety. The tunnels also function as metaphorical space: the interior consciousness of “the black artist,” who struggles to create (and literally, to survive) in a world controlled by the norms of white Western culture and aesthetics. At this symbolic level, the subterranean tunnel setting of the play is itself the action of the mind of an artist, struggling to freedom.
Subway car
Subway car. Train car on which Clay and Lula encounter each other. With its passengers literally pressed into close proximity with one another, the car becomes the site of a compressed narrative of American racial history as it passes through the dark subway tunnels. Within this car, explosive conflicts are framed in harsh light and within sharply delineated space. Clay and Lula are trapped within historical roles and identities, on a stage that is speeding forward into time. The intensely philosophical and politicized violence that unfolds between the two characters is also a social violence shared by other riders when they eventually toss Clay’s body off the train. On this level, the car is America, exposed to light. Within the other symbolic space of the play, the mind of the “black artist,” the subway car serves as an illuminated moment of sharp insight into the threats posed to black artistic consciousness in America.
Dramatic Devices
In Dutchman, Amiri Baraka uses a variety of dramatic devices to underscore the archetypal, mythic, and ritual nature of his play. The obvious artifice of the subway car set connects the play with the world of myth. The incompleteness of the subway car and the conscious artificiality of the flickering lights hung behind the windows deemphasize the realistic specificity of place. The limited lighting, which throughout the first scene highlights only Clay and Lula’s seat, focuses the audience’s attention on these principal characters and their personal interaction. In the second scene, more of the car is lit and other passengers are visible; thus, the audience’s attention is directed toward the social implications of the action. At the end of the play, Lula’s authority is revealed by the manner in which the other passengers unquestioningly follow her instructions; the passengers’ presence also emphasizes the weakness of Clay’s assimilationist strategy. Clay’s disguised existence alienates him from both white and black communities. Thus isolated, he is doomed, because his self-consciousness separates him from the redemptive possibilities of social action.
The comedy, exaggeration, and artificiality of Clay and Lula’s dialogue underscores their function as stereotypes. In the early portions of the play, Baraka creates comic tension between Clay’s determined literalism and Lula’s suggestive symbolism. Clay himself notes that their conversation sounds like a “script,” and at one point Lula feeds him lines, correcting his performance and making him repeat himself. Baraka does not want his audience to suspend disbelief, for an important theme of the play is the manner in which too many Americans guide their lives according to myths rather than their own individual judgments and experiences.
The physical violence with which the play concludes is important, for it underscores Baraka’s belief that violence is a means to self-discovery. Lula’s hysterical rantings and Clay’s sudden, frightening outburst startle the audience into a sudden realization of the hypocrisy that has ruled to that point. In contrast to the deceptive, posturing talk that precedes the play’s dramatic conclusion, the final violent moments seem to say that action is ultimately more legitimate than words. Clay’s concluding monologue is delivered as much to the audience as to Lula or the other passengers, and for this reason Dutchman is most effectively produced in relatively intimate theaters. Just as Clay has been lured into comfortable, false assumptions about Lula’s intentions, Dutchman lures its audiences into comfortable assumptions that are exploded at the conclusion. For a brief time, the anger that has built over the course of the play is released outward toward the audience, and they suddenly find themselves the unwitting accomplices to Clay’s destruction.
Historical Context
Civil Rights in the 1960s
The year Dutchman premiered, 1964, was a turbulent period in the United
States, particularly concerning civil rights. Daily protests, both violent and
nonviolent, highlighted the struggle for equality. Although nearly ten years
had passed since Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white
passenger, igniting a series of bus boycotts that fueled the Civil Rights
Movement, legalized equal rights for African Americans were still often ignored
in practice. Sit-ins and other nonviolent demonstrations were organized to
challenge the resistance of certain businesses, schools, and communities to the
civil rights laws established by the Civil Rights Act.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act addressed fair voting, access to public facilities, education, and employment practices, effectively ending segregation. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was established to ensure equal job opportunities for all races. However, these regulations were frequently disregarded, especially in southern states like Alabama and Mississippi. This defiance often led to heightened tensions and riots in major cities such as Harlem and Philadelphia, where the black population had become the majority for the first time. These "race riots," characterized by verbal and physical confrontations between blacks and whites, continued with little interruption for the next four years.
The summer before the debut of Dutchman, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech at a civil rights rally in Washington, D.C. President John F. Kennedy had attempted to cancel the rally due to fears of violence. However, King's peaceful protest was a success and played a significant role in the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A key focus was ensuring fair voting rights, leading to the abolition of poll taxes designed to disenfranchise black voters. Northern civil rights activists often traveled to southern states to oversee elections and protect black voters. In 1964, three such activists were brutally beaten and murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi, and their killers were not brought to justice until the 1990s.
Baraka, a political activist and playwright, deliberately used his art to advocate for social justice. He was directly involved in race riots and was once arrested for firearm possession and incitement, charges he denied and was later acquitted of. His play Dutchman engaged with the era's prevalent themes of hatred and violence, criticizing a segment of the black community that sought assimilation into white culture. Baraka, along with many others, believed in the necessity of militant resistance against white oppression.
Black Arts Movement
As part of defining a new, self-determined black identity, African Americans
rejected the terms "negro" and "colored," which were linked to racism and
oppression. Instead, they insisted on being called "black" or Afro-American
(later, African American). These terms emphasized positive aspects: the intense
color "black" and the African heritage of former slaves. These ideas combined
in the quest for a new "black" identity. African cultural styles, language, and
values were adopted and sometimes creatively adapted to shape the
"Afro-American" style. The phrase "black is beautiful" recognized both the
aesthetic beauty of the black body and the significance of black culture as a
new black aesthetic.
This significant cultural identity shift also changed the perception of black art. Though jazz had long been a black musical expression, it was often seen more as a craft than a recognized art form. Jazz emerged as an art form in its own right, moving away from its association with (white) Bohemian culture. African artifacts began to be appreciated as art objects rather than merely anthropological curiosities.
Baraka led the re-evaluation of black and African art forms. He wrote jazz criticism for avant-garde magazines and actively promoted black artists in music, art, theater, religion, and cultural values, finding ways to bring them into the public eye. He established a community center called Spirit House in Newark to spread new ideas about black culture. He was a key figure in what became known as the Black Arts Movement, which celebrated black and African culture, black physical features, and urban and rural black dialects. The movement aimed to raise awareness about black art and culture, serving as the American counterpart to Negritude, the Caribbean movement that honored black culture's art, music, and language.
Baraka's poetry explicitly addressed the re-culturizing, political agenda of the Black Arts Movement. In his 1966 collection Black Arts, the poem "Black Art" ends with the lines, "Let the world be a Black Poem/And Let All Black People Speak This Poem/Silently/or LOUD." Baraka was seen as the "high priest" of the Black Arts Movement, spreading his message beyond the intellectual elite through theater, poetry, essays, and actions.
Literary Style
Allegory
The stage directions in Dutchman indicate that the subway is "heaped in
modern myth," signaling the presence of allegorical meaning. Allegory uses
concrete images to convey abstract ideas, and the symbolic elements within the
work hint at this deeper meaning. Therefore, the interaction between Clay and
Lula represents more than just a random meeting on a subway. Symbols in the
play, such as the apple, the subway, and Clay's name, which seems to allude to
Adam (created from clay), suggest that Clay symbolizes the black everyman.
In Dutchman, the allegorical significance of Clay and Lula's relationship parallels that of Adam and Eve. Eve, whether innocently or not, seduced Adam with an apple, a symbol in that story, leading him to forbidden knowledge. Similarly, Lula seduces Clay, shares apples with him, and forces him to confront the reality that his adoption of white, bourgeois values conceals his social powerlessness. This knowledge is forbidden to Clay as it will destroy his illusions. In Baraka's allegory, Lula embodies both white dominance and Baraka's disdain for black assimilation, while Clay represents the passive acceptance of low social status by blacks and their blind adherence to the culture of their oppressors.
Symbolism
Symbolic images and names evoke associations that enhance the meaning of a
literary work. In Dutchman, the apple, a prop associated with Eve,
recurs throughout the play. Lula enters the stage eating an apple delicately.
She offers one to Clay and continues to offer more until he finally refuses.
Her abundance of apples implies that their corrupting influence is so extensive
that Clay cannot escape contamination.
The play's title is also symbolic, referring to the legendary ghost ship, the Flying Dutchman, cursed to sail the seas endlessly, bringing death in its path. Additionally, it alludes to the Dutch slave ships that transported blacks into slavery. Clay's name suggests a black Adam, someone shaped by white society, like clay. The accumulation of these symbols and the dynamics between Clay and Lula reinforce the significance of this interpretation.
The setting of Dutchman carries significant symbolic meaning. Baraka highlighted the importance of the train's symbolism in the stage directions, describing the subway as "heaped in modern myth." This play addresses the contemporary myth of black assimilation, where one confines themselves to the low-status paths of the "flying underbelly of the city." The entire narrative unfolds in a subterranean world, within a subway car speeding towards its destination. The train slows down, stops to allow passengers on and off, and then accelerates again. There is an illusion of movement and progress, but the train actually repeats the same route endlessly. Clay is merely following the "track" of white culture, feeling a sense of forward motion but in reality confined to the lower class, or underbelly, of the bustling city above. Subway trains transport people across the city, covering the same short distances repeatedly, adhering to a monotonous daily schedule—the path is cyclical. Similarly, Lula's pattern of seducing and killing her victims is cyclical. She hints that she has been doing this for years and has a "gray hair for each year and type."
Autobiographical Elements
When Baraka wrote Dutchman, he was immersed in the Bohemian literary
scene of Greenwich Village (the Beats) and was married to a white woman, with
whom he co-edited a literary magazine. Like Clay, he grew up in New Jersey and
had ambitions as a poet. However, Baraka's real life was a successful version
of Clay's; he awakened from his dream of assimilation in time to avoid his
protagonist's fate.
In the play, Clay shouts at Lula, "If I'm a middle-class fake white man...let me be. And let me be in the way I want." Just a year later, Baraka would reject his entire white world—wife, children, and all—to begin a new, black life in Harlem. To some extent, the play can be seen as a critique of Baraka's period of assimilation, where he condemns himself through Lula's words and actions. The playwright symbolically eliminates his passive, "white" self through this fictional narrative and is reborn in real life as the hero that Clay refuses (or is unable) to become.
Compare and Contrast
1964: Racial tensions are at their height, with numerous protests erupting in major cities. The 1964 Civil Rights Act is blatantly disregarded by many southern businesses, schools, and local governments. Although African Americans now possess the same voting, employment, and educational rights as white Americans, they are often illegally prevented from exercising these rights. The summer of 1964 is dubbed "Freedom Summer" due to the numerous protest demonstrations held nationwide in support of Civil Rights.
Today: Minorities are guaranteed their legal rights as U.S. citizens. Schools, polling places, and businesses are diligent in upholding civil rights laws.
1964: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is established to ensure that employers do not discriminate based on race, age, or gender. In 1965, President Johnson expands Equal Opportunity through an executive order for Affirmative Action, requiring active recruitment of minorities in employment and education.
Today: Some Americans advocate for the elimination of Affirmative Action, arguing that it promotes reverse discrimination and that the progress in equal opportunity over the past thirty years makes it unnecessary. Opponents of California Proposition 209 argue that Affirmative Action is still needed to address the "glass ceiling" of unequal pay and status that minorities and women face in the job market.
1964: Race riots are common, with armed groups of whites and blacks clashing openly in urban areas like Philadelphia and Harlem. The National Guard is called in several times to restore order. Over the next few years, major cities such as Watts and Detroit will also experience race riots as the nation grapples with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Acts.
Today: Although race riots are now rare, three days of violent rioting erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of four police officers who were videotaped beating Rodney King, an African American man, during a routine traffic stop. The National Guard was again called in to restore peace, and the property damage reached millions of dollars. This incident highlighted ongoing discrimination in police forces and other bureaucratic agencies. A poll in 1997 revealed that over two-thirds of Los Angeles residents still view race relations as a significant issue.
Media Adaptations
In 1967, Anthony Harvey directed a film adaptation of Dutchman, which garnered minimal attention and had a short run in small theaters. Al Freeman, Jr. starred as Clay, while Shirley Knight took on the role of Lula. The film was produced by Kaitlin Productions, Ltd. in collaboration with the Dutchman Film Company. It is available through San Francisco, California Newsreels.
Bibliography and Further Reading
SOURCES
Bigsby, C. W. E. "Black Drama: The Public Voice" in his The Second Black
Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature, Greenwood Press, 1980, pp.
207-56.
Cade, Tom. "Black Theater" in Black Expressions: Essays by and about Black Americans in the Creative Arts, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., Weybright and Talley, 1969, pp. 134-43.
Eberstadt, Isabel. "King of the East Village" in New York Herald Tribune, December 13, 1964, Sunday Magazine Section, p. 13.
Ferguson, John. "Dutchman and The Slave" in Modern Drama, February 13, 1971, pp. 398-405.
Frost, David. Television interview with LeRoi Jones on The David Frost Show, Group W Productions, Westinghouse Broadcasting Company (Los Angeles), 1969.
Hudson, Theodore R. From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: The Literary Works, Duke University Press, 1973.
Lewis, Allan. American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theatre, Crown, 1965.
Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth Century Negro American Authors, Lippincott, 1968.
Miller, James A. "Amiri Baraka" in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats' Literary Bohemians in Post-War America, edited by Ann Charters, Gale (Detroit), 1983, pp. 3-24.
Reilly, Charlie, Editor. Conversations with Amiri Baraka, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Schneck, Stephen. "LeRoi Jones, or, Poetics & Politics, or, Trying Heart, Bleeding Heart" in Ramparts, July 13, 1968, pp. 14-19.
"A Survey: Black Writers' Views on Literary Lions and Values" in Negro Digest, January 1968, pp. 16-18.
Turner, Darwin T. Black American Literature: Poetry, Charles E. Merrill, 1969.
X, Marvin. "An Interview with Ed Bullins on Black Theatre" in Negro Digest, April 1969, p. 16.
FURTHER READING
Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz
Aesthetic, University of Missouri Press, 1985. Explores the influence of
jazz on Baraka's poetic works.
Lacey, Henry C. To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Whitson, 1981. Analyzes Baraka's works within the context of his artistic evolution.
Nelson, Hugh. "LeRoi Jones's Dutchman: A Brief Ride on a Doomed Ship" in Educational Theatre Journal, Vol. 20, March 1968, pp. 53-58. Discusses the origins of the Flying Dutchman motif in Baraka's play.
Olaniyan, Tejumola. Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama, Oxford University Press, 1995. A post-colonialist critique by a notable scholar of African American studies, detailing how the performative nature of drama by Wole Soyinka, Amiri Baraka, Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange signifies black artists' departure from Eurocentric and Afrocentric norms.
Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Examines the dynamics of cultural domination, a form of oppression that Baraka aimed to challenge.
West, Cornel. Race Matters, Beacon Press, 1993. Provides an in-depth analysis of the social and economic aspects of racism.
Bibliography
Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976. Argues that Clay’s is a tragedy of lost direction and lack of knowledge: In deciding not to kill Lula, he rejects the power and violence that would allow him to dominate the situation; he thus reaffirms his vulnerability and falls victim to Lula’s malevolence.
Bigsby, C. W. E. “Black Theater.” In Beyond Broadway. Vol. 3 in A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Analyzes the play in the context of the early 1960’s, as reflecting the self-awareness of a black playwright balancing a successful career as a writer and political necessities that seemed to require actions rather than words.
Brown, Lloyd W. Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Although Clay is killed, Brown sees a kind of triumph in the assertion of humanity that makes his death inevitable.
Fabre, Geneviève. “LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka: An Iconoclastic Theatre.” In Drumbeats, Masks, and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre. Translated by Melvin Dixon. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. For Fabre, a paradox of the play is that Lula reveals Clay to himself. His awakening comes too late, because he has already made too many compromises and too soon, because it is merely an individual, rather than communal, awakening, and therefore it is ineffectual.
Luter, Matthew. “Dutchman’s Signifyin(g) Subway: How Amiri Baraka Takes Ralph Ellison Underground.” In Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self, edited by Trudier Harris and Jennifer Larson. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Argues that Baraka, despite his claims to the contrary, was strongly influenced by Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and that Dutchman is as much informed by Baraka’s worries about staking out an identity as an original African American writer as it is about his concerns with how to be an authentic African American man.
Sollors, Werner. Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Popular Modernism.” New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Asserts that Dutchman combines a realistic look at American society with the absurdist and surrealist traditions of European theater. Lula, although a negative force in the play, expresses many of the playwright’s own ideas in his own language.
Walker, Victor Leo, II. “Archetype and Masking in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman.” In Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora, edited by Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker II, and Gus Edwards. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. Looks at the antirealist aspects of Baraka’s play and their function in the representation of racial identity.
Watts, Jerry Gafio. Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press, 2001. Frank reappraisal of Baraka, focusing on the contradictions between his public and private personas and balancing his brilliance with the more derivative aspects of his work. Based on rereadings of other people’s interviews, rather than new interviews conducted by the author himself.