A Rereading and Repositioning of Roles in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

Amiri Baraka’s well-known and both vastly praised and criticized play Dutchman is a primary example of Revolutionary Theater, which Baraka conceptualizes as a theater that “forces” its audience to confront the realities of social injustice, and “accuse” and “attack” its practitioners. In this sense, Dutchman is a model text of Baraka’s compulsion toward destruction through art. This article argues that the prevalent view in the scholarship on this play reduces Clay and Lula as victim and victimizer. This article aims to present these characters in a postmodernist light, as more complex and less stereotyped. Thus, they can be seen as having equally the potential to change and the potential to destroy insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(themselves and/or the society);. In the final analysis, Baraka presents a true piece of Revolutionary Theater in Dutchman: powerful, accusatory and destructive.