Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Helene Keyssar

Critical Essay by Helene Keyssar

SOURCE: "Lost Illusions, New Visions: Imamu Amiri Baraka's 'Dutchman,'" in The Curtain and the Veil: Strategies in Black Drama, Burt Franklin & Co., 1981, pp. 147-76.

In the following excerpt, Keyssar argues that Baraka has portrayed the main characters of "Dutchman" realistically, not just symbolically, thereby intensifying their effect on the audience.

There is, as in most drama, an attempt in "Dutchman" to change the spectator's way of looking at the world. "Dutchman," however, works in such a way that for spectators as well as stage characters, changes in perspective vary according to whether one is black or white. "Dutchman" makes manifest the ambivalent intentions that have been disguised or latent in earlier black dramas. While "Great Goodness of Life" and other black revolutionary dramas urge the need for separate dramatic strategies for black and white audiences by aiming their intentions only at black spectators, "Dutchman" acknowledges the encounter of...
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