Approaches to Teaching Baraka’s Dutchman
- Editors: Matthew Calihman, Gerald Early
- Pages: 224
- Published: 2018
- ISBN: 9781603293556 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603293549 (Hardcover)
“Beyond providing insights into the play, its history, and its context, this inspiring volume gives tips on how to ease students into Baraka’s drama. In short, it helps teachers both understand and teach this disturbing, influential, and great American play.”
—William J. Harris, University of Kansas
First performed in 1964, Amiri Baraka’s play about a charged encounter between a black man and a white woman still has the power to shock. The play, steeped in the racial issues of its time, continues to speak to racial violence and inequality today.
This volume offers strategies for guiding students through this short but challenging text. Part 1, “Materials,” provides resources for biographical information, critical and literary backgrounds, and the play’s early production history. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” address viewing and staging Dutchman theatrically in class. They help instructors ground the play artistically in the black arts movement, the beat generation, the theater of the absurd, pop music, and the blues. Background on civil rights, black power movements, the history of slavery, and Jim Crow laws helps contextualize the play politically and historically.
Andrew Ade
James D. Bloom
Tess Chakkalakal
Jim Cocola
Caleb Corkery
Kurt Hemmer
Molly Hiro
Danny M. Hoey, Jr.
Katarzyna Jakubiak
Jean-Philippe Marcoux
William Thomas McBride
D. Quentin Miller
Koritha Mitchell
Deborah M. Mix
Daniel Morris
Meenakshi Ponnuswami
Andrew Sargent
Richard Schur
Roland Leander Williams, Jr.
Preface (vii)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Biographical and Autobiographical Materials (3)
Book-Length Studies, Edited Collections, and Special Issues (3)
Early Productions (4)
Contexts (8)
Editions (14)
Other Texts (15)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
Introduction (19)
Performing Identities
Teaching Dutchman through Creative Writing (26)
Dutchman in the Round (34)
Teaching Dutchman from an International Perspective (42)
Dutchman Heaped in Modern Cinema (51)
Dramatic Histories
Dutchman in the Drama Class (63)
Baraka’s Aesthetic Radicalism: Dutchman’s Modernist Roots (71)
Breaking from the Beats: Teaching Dutchman as a Critique of Bohemianism (77)
Dutchman as Black Avant-Garde Historical Drama (84)
Culture and Violence in Dutchman and the Black Arts Movement (91)
What’s Love Got to Do with It? Everything! Teaching Dutchman and “The Revolutionary Theatre” (97)
Cultural Interplays
“Free of Your Own History”: Implicating Students in Dutchman (106)
Reading Dutchman’s Setting (114)
Dutchman, the Black Body, and the Law (122)
Dutchman’s Uncle Tom (127)
Dutchman, A Raisin in the Sun, and the History of Minstrel Theater (134)
Dutchman and Black Vernacular Culture (140)
“And That’s How the Blues Was Born”: Baraka’s Dutchman and Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie in Conversation (147)
“No Metaphors,” “No Grunts”: Dutchman, Black Art, and Authenticity (154)
Amiri Baraka and Philip Roth: Passing, Place, and Identity (161)
Teaching Dutchman with Chappelle’s Show: Arguments along the Color Line (168)
Notes on Contributors (177)
Survey Participants (181)
Works Cited (183)
Index (203)
