Political Allegory Of Amiri Baraka's 'Dutchman'

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Dutchman, considered to be Amiri Baraka's best play, by which he won the Village Voice's Obie Award for the best American play of the 1963-1964 season, and later being developed to a film (Peterson 21). Moreover, it was Jerry Watt who seems to praise Amiri Baraka's Dutchman as his best known single work (67), Watt also makes use of Harold Clurman, a theatre critic, who reviewed Dutchman in The Nation magazine in 1964; Clurman called LeRoi Jones as an outstanding dramatist. Dutchman might be regarded both a political allegory, which describes the relationships between the black and the white, and an allegory of racial relationships in the US. The play's first scene initiates with a white person, Lula, which can be significant and interpreted as the Other, who is urgent in the process of recognition. However, the recognition is not as it should be, in other words, no …show more content…

Not only did she lie but also twice, in both scenes, she freely admitted that she always lied: LULA. Well, you're wrong. I'm no actress. I told you I always lie (19). LULA. Well, I told you I wasn't an actress ... but I also told you lie all the time (27). That being so, Lula tried to manipulate Clay into being seduced by her fabricated stories. Lula's lies might be considered as the stories that the white concoct so that they can easily manipulate the black as objects. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon states that Negroes' problems stem from being brought up by the white fabricated stories: This is the heart of the problem...the Wolf, the Devil...the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with...the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, missionary “who faces he danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.”

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