The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman.

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African essentialism for what was identified as Western essentialism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is among those who have critiqued the Black Arts Movement for promoting a "poetics rooted in a social realism, indeed, in a sort of mimeticism," in which the "relation between black art and black life was a direct one" (102). In place of the sociopolitical and empirical binarism of black and white, Gates advocates understanding "race" in the postmodernist terms of a "trope" in which the categories of black and white are not preconstituted. Amiri Baraka's work has been seen, from this postmodernist position, as advocating an essentialist and unproblematic conception of black identity.

This essay attempts to rethink the question of Baraka's binarism. The argument is that, while Baraka's retributive logic is focused on the need for assertion of ethnic and racial identity, his work also reveals complex negotiations with such binary categories as black/white and art/activism. In his essays and theoretical pronouncements Baraka sets up a fixed, non-dialectic opposition between black and white, and the categories have the double load of racial and metaphysical meaning. The white Western usage of black as a signifier of evil, death, and darkness is directly reversed, and white is made to carry the suggestions of sickness, death, and absence. When we analyze blackness in Baraka, we realize that it is both the goal to be passionately struggled for, and the innate being of the African American. The impassioned rhetoric that is built up in Baraka's essays around the terms black and white often projects the two worlds as mutually and self-evidently exclusive. Below the level of passionate rhetoric, however, the categories remain tenuously defined and shifting. Quite often the terms beg the question. "The Black Man must aspire to Blackness," says Baraka in "The Legacy of Malcolm X" (Home 248). If blackness is both the natural and the ideal state, then the term black evidently is not definitive, and needs to be defined. The charge of Baraka's propounding "black essentialism" also needs further examination, since the polarization of white and black in his work may be more apparent and strategic than real.

Rejection of the White World

What was the significance of Baraka's move from downtown New York to Harlem in 1965 and his resolute severing of ties with the white world? His essays written around this time are aggressively anti-white, and in them Baraka dwells on the necessity of destroying white culture in order to build black culture and consciousness. The white world is repeatedly described as evil, sick, and dying, and the creation of a positive black consciousness is crucially linked to the declaration of white culture as evil and insane. "In a time of chaos, in a time of trouble, we're asking for unity, black unity as defense against these mad white people who continue to run the world" (Baraka, Home 234). In a similar key, Baraka's compatriot Larry Neal, in "The Black Arts Movement," declares that the "motive behind the Black aesthetic is the destruction of the white thing, the destruction of white ideas, and white ways of looking at the world" (30). "Hate whitey" was the rallying point around which much of the black nationalist activity was being organized. "It was our intention," Baraka writes in his Autobiography, "to be hard and unyielding in our hatred because we felt that's what was needed, to hate these devils with all our hearts, that that would help in their defeat and our own liberation" (216).

This aggressive and unyielding anti-white position, which was a cornerstone of black nationalism in the middle and late 1960s, needs to be seen against the background of the integrationist Civil Rights Movement of the preceding decades. Martin Luther King's scheme of race relations proposed integration as a spiritual ideal that would engender acceptance and love between the two races. But Harold Cruse, in his influential book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, struck out at liberal Civil Rights leaders chasing the mirage of social integration, as if there existed "a great body of homogenized, inter-assimilated white Americans" with whom blacks could integrate (9). He rejected the notion of the melting pot and claimed that, while other ethno-religious groups had no desire to integrate with each other, American blacks alone had been mesmerized by this ideal. Black nationalism, he concluded, was the only viable course for blacks trying to forge their individual and collective identities.

These rejections of the white world, however, cannot simply be understood as realistic and attainable goals. In some cases they were inspired by the various struggles of independence being waged across Africa and Asia. There is, however, a crucial difference, since the African American could aspire to nationhood only in spirit, not material control of land. Therefore these gestures of rejection have to be seen primarily as ideological and rhetorical strategies for the empowerment of the community.

A gesture is capable of sustaining a goal only up to a point, beyond which it turns into its own caricature. Thus the real gains made by the rhetoric of difference can be appreciated only after its limitations have been acknowledged and put aside. An essential corollary to the goal of black consciousness is that it is often defined in terms of its rejection of, and independence from, the white world. One cannot help noticing the irony in the persistence of the concern with the white world in Baraka's essays, even as he obsessively rejects it. Of course, he did give material form to the gesture by severing ties with the white world in the downtown Village and moving to Harlem.

My argument here is that in his emphatic gesture of rejection of the white world and ostensible establishment of a black community Baraka, at least in spirit, seems to accomplish a dual task. While he sets out the objectives of independence and self-determination for African Americans in strong, bold terms, he simultaneously moves the debate about the nature and definition of blackness, and also that of whiteness, to a more abstract level. The change of the "trope of blackness," to borrow Gates's terms, into a "trope of presence" is not accompanied by a closure of meaning but by opening up possibilities. "Blackness" and "whiteness" become internalized categories. The enemy is not only the white person, who is easily identifiable, but the whiteness hidden in shades of blackness, where it can be more difficult to detect. Hence we find his retributive rhetoric turning not only against whites but also sometimes against blacks as well.

Blackness, for Baraka, is a value that the black person has to learn. "The Black Man must idealize himself as Black. And idealize and aspire to that" (Baraka, Home 248). While the attainment of "a united Black Consciousness" remains the goal, the possibility of its definition and attainment remains problematic. In his plays, Baraka engages with the issue of racial dialectic at the level of identity construction and representation even as he attempts explicitly to align the power of art with the larger political and social agenda of the African American community.

"We want 'poems that kill'": Baraka's Dutchman

A tendency see Baraka's plays as the apotheosis of the message of the Black Arts Movement can sometimes blind us to the innumerable complexities of his work. One perspective from which we can view his work is to see it not as the simple, straight-forward embodiment of the ideas of "nationalism" and "revolution," or as an expression of a "true black identity," but as an attempt to dislodge the received opposition between various binary categories such as aesthetic/politics, black/white, individual/community, mask/face, and Europe/Africa by simultaneously occupying a radically altered perspective and privileging marginalized positions.

Dutchman has been one of the most popular of Jones/Baraka's plays and hence one that has received abundant critical attention. In an influential and then-comprehensive study of Baraka's work, Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask, Kimberly W. Benston traces in the action of the play a typical tragic pattern: "the fall from innocence through hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe" (158). Through tracing the classic tragic pattern in Clay's fall, Benston places him historically as a pre-revolutionary victim who is also the harbinger of eventual black triumph. In a later essay, "Performing Blackness," Benston outlines two distinct theories of black selfhood and the formation of that selfhood by and in the "play" of language. He contrasts Ralph Ellison's vision of blackness as an endlessly mediated sign with what he suggests is Baraka's more "essential" figuration of blackness. "For Baraka," Benston says,

   the expressions of language and the
   body of blackness are diametrically
   opposed; discourse and being are not,
   as for Ellison, inextricable, and the possibility
   of "knowing" begins with an
   emphatic refusal of eloquence's prestige.
   Blackness, far from being inextricable
   from the paradoxes of its articulation,
   finally transcends representation.
   ("Performing" 172)

Benston's excellent analysis of blackness based on Clay's "pumping black heart" speech in Dutchman is, however, a little misleading about the play, since it allocates to Baraka a position on blackness that belongs really to Clay, and not to the play as a whole. In the play, this essentialist view of blackness that lies beyond the representational realm is shown ultimately to be self-defeating and self-destructive, since it presumes an impossibility of communication.

Several other studies have also projected the play's concern with black "manhood" and identity, finding in Clay either a fulfillment or a failure of selfhood. C. W. E. Bigsby reads in this play a direct opposition between language and action, and he sees Clay as trapped in his articulateness. At the climactic moment, Bigsby says, Clay "relapses into language ... and discards the brutal sanity of action." He sees Clay, and Jones/Baraka too, as a black intellectual who recognizes "the simple logic of revolt" but "wishes to lapse back into the safety of words and the indirections of art." Drawing on the experience of Clay, Bigsby concludes, rather unproblematically, that the play "constitutes a temptation to substitute aesthetics for action" (398). George Piggford, in "Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race," makes a similar argument by pointing to the divide between action and language and suggesting that the play posits the primacy of action but falls short of achieving black "manhood" because of Clay's inability to murder Lula. Piggford says that

   Baraka's text does not provide a cure
   for the "color problem" through an
   understanding of it. Though Fanon's
   "single answer" to the "color problem"
   is articulated by Clay--and that
   answer is "murder"--the problem is
   not eliminated. For Baraka, a public
   expression of this answer is a necessary
   first step but it is not--as Fanon
   wrongly assumed--the revolution
   itself. (78)

Piggford concludes his essay by contending that in Dutchman "Baraka both diagnoses the problem in American society--white dominance--and prescribes his cure: race revolution and murder" (82). Both Bigsby's and Piggford's readings seem to suggest that the play has thematically arrived at an unambiguous solution to the color problem--murder and revolution-which, however, it fails to achieve within its own plot.

My disagreement with these readings lies in their rather unproblematic assumptions that the play offers a definitive statement on blackness, suggests a binary division between art and action, then argues for the simple primacy of action over language and art. These assumptions rest largely on Clay's passionate speech, in which he scathingly argues for rage and murder as the solution to the neurosis of black people and says to Lula, "You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart" (Baraka, Dutchman 34). This statement does suggest an existing, formed black sense of identity, perhaps even an essentialist and inaccessible one. To extend, however, these perceptions of murderous rage and a lived sense of reality from Clay to the play as a whole, and to interpret these as the central meaning and the monologic message of the play, is certainly not justified. My argument is that the play itself, as distinguished from Clay's perceptions, does not offer any simple duality, either between white and black or between art and action. Dutchman is not a definitive statement on, or an embodiment of, "blackness," but is rather an exploration of the various strategies of representation of black identity and the possibility of unraveling these. The play does not so much posit an authentic black sense of selfhood as explore the processes and modes of misrepresentation concerning it. It engages dialectically with racial domination in terms of representation and attempts to invest art and language with the power and immediacy of action.

The plot of Dutchman is bare and stark. Other than the background cast of Riders of Coach, and the brief appearances of Young Negro and Conductor, the play has only two characters, Clay, a twenty-year-old Negro, and Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman. The entire action of the play takes place in "the flying underbelly of the city. Steaming hot, and summer on top, outside. Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth" (3). Clay and Lula engage in flirtatious repartee that becomes increasingly sharp and terse. To Clay Lula is a white bohemian; to Lula, Clay is a typical middle-class young black, eager to achieve success on the terms laid down by white America. Lula becomes aggressive and insulting, calling him a "liver-lipped white man ... just a dirty white man" (31). Finally Clay slaps her and bursts into a long, uncontrollable, and dramatically powerful speech that begins to wrench away the middle-class fake-white-man facade and offer a glimpse into the tortured and conflicted psyche of a black man in America. He gains the upper hand but decides not to kill Lula. She, however, calmly stabs Clay while other subway riders look on passively, which suggests their complicity. She orders them to throw his body off the train. The train stops, and another young black man enters and sits near Lula. She follows his movements, hinting that the drama is going to be played out all over again.

To examine the issue of reality and representation, it would be instrumental to approach the play through Lula and her many faces. Lula is described in the play as "a tall, slender, beautiful woman with long red hair hanging straight down her back wearing only loud lipstick in somebody's good taste." Dressed in bright, skimpy summer clothes, she enters the subway "eating an apple, very daintily" (5). So far the details represent a realistic character not very difficult to comprehend and locate in a social context. As soon as she begins to talk, however, she breaks the rules of the game, or rather dictates both the game and the rules. Very deliberately she begins to invest herself with elusiveness, unpredictability, and mysteriousness, eventually acquiring an extremely powerful and threatening dimension. Lula is a strategist whose every word and move, in retrospect, are loaded with significance and deliberateness. Her strategies are concerned with, and belong to, the realm of looking, appearance, and representation of self and others.

Significantly, the opening action of the play revolves around looking and being looked at. After Lula enters the car, she stops beside Clay's seat, and the stage direction reads: "It is apparent that she is going to sit in the seat next to CLAY, and that she is only waiting for him to notice her before she sits." Clay sees the woman and "looks up into her face, smiling quizzically" (5; italics mine). She opens the dialogue by commenting on the weight she is carrying, to which he replies, "Doesn't look like much to me." Her retort, "It's so anyway," begins to hint, very unobtrusively, at the hiatus between "being" and "looking." After this bit of small talk, however, she confronts him head-on. "Weren't you staring at me through the window?" she says, and follows it with the more startling charge that he was staring through the window "down in the vicinity of my ass and legs" (8; italics mine). The talk soon shifts to what Clay looks like and Lula's delineation of his character. "Looking," both in its active sense of 'seeing' and 'perceiving' and in its passive sense of 'appearing,' forms a central preoccupation of this play. Lula invests this activity with deliberateness, consciousness, and motive. We can analyze Lula and her strategies of perception by considering her in the following ways.

Lula as a Postmodernist

The emergence of post-structuralism in the 1960s had radical implications for humanist thinking and the ideas of personhood. Instead of being a stable and determinate locus of meaning, the human being became a field of indeterminacy and interpretive freedom that pervaded every arena in postmodernist theory. In "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," Derrida, talking about interpretation and meaning, says:

   There are two interpretations of interpretation.
   The one seeks to decipher,
   dreams of deciphering a truth or an
   origin which escapes play and the
   order of the sign and which lives the
   necessity of interpretation as an exile.
   The other, which is no longer turned
   toward the origin, affirms play and
   tries to pass beyond man and humanism,
   the name of man being the name
   of that being who, throughout the history
   of metaphysics and of onto-theology--in
   other words, throughout his
   entire history--has dreamed of full
   presence, of reassuring foundation, of
   the origin and the end of play. (121-22)

Added to the idea of interpretation as play, rather than an activity sustained by an end or an origin, is the further problem that language itself is indeterminate, with endless possibilities of meaning open in it. As Jonathan Culler observes in On Deconstruction, "A Derridean would agree that the language game is played but might go on to point out that one can never be quite certain who is playing, or playing 'seriously,' what the rules are, or which game is being played" (130-31).

Derrida's book Writing and Difference, in which "Structure, Sign and Play" appears, was published in English in 1978, but in 1964, in Dutchman, Lula is already a Derridean in her interpretation of "self." She is, or rather represents herself as being, an indeterminate creature for whom being is a form of game playing. Soon after confronting Clay, she begins building up his persona through a series of conjectures that have no verifiable source. She informs Clay that he looks like he has been trying to grow a beard, that he lives in New Jersey with his parents, that he has been reading Chinese poetry and drinking lukewarm sugarless tea, and that he looks "like death eating a soda cracker" (8). These details have a certain amount of validity and reliability as conjecture and stereotyping, and the fact that most of this accords with Clay's life baffles him and puts him on the track of further expectation of referentiality. Because most of what Lula has said is true about his life, he insists that she must know his friend, Warren Enright, or be a friend of his sister, Georgia. Lula, however, pulls the rug from under his feet when she says, "I told you I lie a lot. I don't know your sister. I don't know Warren Enright." Lula is not only unconcerned with the verifiability of her conjectures, but is also not interested in their validity. To Clay's puzzled response, "I look like all that?" she replies nonchalantly, "Not all of it.... I lie a lot. It helps me control the world" (10). Lula certainly controls her interaction with Clay through whatever construction and direction she puts upon her language. The dialogue between the two is not so much an interaction, as a series of self-conscious inanities initiated and concluded autonomously by Lula, to which Clay responds as best he can. She talks about going to a party with Clay, about going to her house, about Clay's history and sociology--all, however, as self-conscious play on words and ideas. Lula entices, rebuffs, analyzes, and insults Clay with very little provocation from him.

Lula's stereotyping of Clay contrasts pointedly with her representation of herself as indeterminate, changeable, and unpredictable. Clay's efforts to locate and fix her image are rebuffed in a weary kind of manner. She meets his searching comments with the dismissive "I told you I wasn't an actress ... but I also told you I lie all the time. Draw your own conclusions" (27). Whatever information she does give about herself is supposed to come as a surprise to Clay. The reference to her age in her comment, "My hair is turning gray. A gray hair for each year and type I've come through," and the information that she lives in a tenement because it reminds her "specifically of my novel form of insanity," are unexpected bits of news to Clay (13, 24). Even her generalization about "life" as "change"--"Our whole story ... nothing but change"--is undercut immediately by the cryptic comment, "Except I do go on as I do" (28). Her changeableness and "playfulness," initially innocuous, turn menacing and finally destructive when she kills Clay after he has harangued her about himself and his tortured and hidden psyche. She becomes hard and businesslike as she says, "I've heard enough," and plunges her small knife twice into Clay's chest (37). Lula's apparent randomness takes on a sinister, premeditated aspect as she orders the other subway riders to throw Clay's body out, starts straightening her things and getting everything in order. It is as if she has timed and controlled the entry of the next young Negro who walks into the coach, completely oblivious of the preceding action. The suggestion of premeditatedness of Lula's plan is there in the play at the beginning, when the direction reads that she "begins very premeditatedly to smile," as well as at the play's end, and thus frames the main action of the play (4). Within the play, however, even her premeditatedness remains an element of her unpredictability.

Lula as the Dominant "Self"/The "Other" as the "Fake Self"

In marked contrast Lula's sense of her own identity, her perception of Clay is a series of stereotyped images hurled at him without any pretense or apology. She tells him disarmingly, "You are a well-known type" (12). She evokes every stereotype that has historically defined the African American, from the escaped slave to Uncle Tom to a "middle-class fake white man" (34). Stereotyping is the most efficient form of lying that helps Lula control Clay. The strategy by which she transforms stereotypes into structures of power and control is by working into the images an element of culpability, which can then become the reason for destroying the black man. "Everything you say [and do] is wrong," Lula tells Clay, and this works as the premise on which perceptions are built. As a nigger, he is an "escaped nigger"; as a non-nigger; he is "just a dirty white man." Not fitting the image of a real "nigger," he becomes a "liver-lipped white man" (31). Ridiculing Clay for wearing a jacket and tie, Lula tells him the brutal truth that these things belong to the tradition he ought to feel oppressed by. She characterizes him as either guilty or fake, with little possibility of an authentic existence.

The most condemning dimension of the stereotyped images in the play involves black sexuality. Although the sexual overtures here belong to Lula, they are made on the assumption of wayward sexual energy in Clay. Lula is undeterred by Clay's attempts to deviate from the image, and plays out the game of seduction, provocation, and castration determinedly. At the end, when she impales him, it is not clear whether the reason lies in the culpable sexuality she imagines in him, or in his refusal to conform to that image. When she begins to dance in "a rhythmical shudder and twist like wiggle," and calls on him to "rub bellies," he reacts with fury telling her, "You want to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how" (30, 34).

Historically the white woman was used to castrate the black man with the accusation of rape. Here, however, a refusal to rape is an equally good reason for the sentence of death. Lula is aggressive and menacing and emerges as the face of an orchestrated, destructive white power. Lula deals with Clay's long outburst near the end of the play, beginning with, "Shit, you don't have any sense, Lula, nor feelings either," in an extremely crisp and businesslike manner (33). "I've heard enough," she says, and proceeds to plunge her knife into his chest. In the subway, in the world of the play, Lula's authority is supreme and unchallenged. Clay's act of assertion is an offense, a sin for which the only retribution is death. Lula, and all that she represents, becomes the reason as well as the agent of the destruction of Clay and his world.

Clay's long, accusatory harangue talks about his "pure heart, the pumping black heart," and traces the connection between black rage and black art that has been the focus of much critical attention. It has assured life and hearing to the play as surely as it means death for Clay. The force and conviction of this climactic speech are palpable. Its interpretation and the question of its framing, however--precisely because Clay's words are so raw and direct--remain open to difference. The speech has often been interpreted as a definitive statement by Baraka on certain key issues faced by the African American artist. Seen this way, the statement has been assumed to be a retributive, hard-hitting one which preaches that only a reversal of the binary position, which would put the "black man" in the position of assault, would offer a possibility of change. While there is no denying that the speech raises important issues, to treat it as the meaning of the play and to lay the weight of the play on it is to judge the whole by its part. There seems to be very little justification--in spite of the fact that Clay, like Baraka, is a poet--for treating Clay's voice as that of the playwright, without framing the speech within the structure of the play.

Clay's monologue is structured as a series of reversals and revelations. Assuming the control of speech, Clay for a while reverses the power relationship with Lula and the rest of the people in the subway car. This sense of power is perceived and expressed as the power to kill: "I could murder you ... and all these weak-faced ofays," Clay proclaims (33). This perception of his power, however, gives way to a revelation of the dilemmas and the inherent conflict at the root of this sense of power. Art, rage, and reason are represented as painfully locked together in the psyche of the black man in America. Clay projects African American art as a form of misplaced and transmuted rage in his oft-quoted references to Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker: "Bird would have played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw." The disjunction between the mask and the self creates a neurosis with which the black man deals through its oblique expression in art. Through her music, Clay contends, Bessie Smith says, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass" (35). Clay's solution to this neurosis is murder, which however, even in the process of its exposition, becomes rhetorical and metaphorical: "They will cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from your bones, in sanitary isolation" (36). This rhetoric of murder is instantly contrasted in the play with Lula's act of conducting a swift and real murder. This dialectic of speech and action is also an undercutting of one by the other. Lula's power of speech is undercut by Clay's discourse about the power of action, which is further undercut by Lula's demonstration of real power through action.

Lest this interplay of language, art, and action be interpreted at individual levels, the play takes care to make visible a car full of people who are the supporting agents whose role in the power game cannot be discounted. Thus the passionate but rather simplistic message of Clay's speech linking art with rage and valorizing rage over art is allowed to retain its urgency, even as the play puts it back in its more complex perspective by bringing in the larger context. The play also demonstrates the power of Clay's speech, which can reach the audience even though it is summarily dismissed by Lula. In a complex interworking, the play thus affirms as well as denies the validity of art in the process of self-liberation.

Clay's message of rage cannot be equated with Baraka's valorizing of an activist and committed art. When Baraka proclaims in his poem "Black Art" that "We want 'poems that kill'/ Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns," he is not displacing art by rage, but is rather struggling to invest art with more power (219). Nor can the play be seen as advocating an essentialist perception of black identity encapsulated in Clay's "pumping black heart" image. On the contrary, Baraka is here combating the forms of representation/ perception that become forms of persecution by denying blackness any possibility of viable existence. The source of this persecution, the play suggests, lies in a severing of modes of representation and discourse from any authentic context. Thus, in the dialectical, penetrative understanding embodied in the play, the retributive logic remains, but not merely in the form of physical violence. White violence is seen to be operating at the level of the construction of black identity, and it is at this level that the play seeks to contend with the oppressive structures of the binary, racial logic.

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones). The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones. New York: Freundlich, 1984.

--. "Black Art." The LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader. Ed. William J. Harris. New York: Thunder's Mouth P, 1991. 219.

--. Dutchman. Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow, 1964. 3-38.

--. Home: Social Essays. New York: Morrow, 1966.

--. Raise Race Rays Raze. New York: Vintage, 1969. Benston, Kimberly W. Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. New Haven: Yale UP, 1976.

--. "Performing Blackness: Re/Placing Afro-American Poetry." Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., and Patricia Redmond. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. 164-93.

Bigsby, C. W. E. A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama 3: Beyond Broadway. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New York: Morrow, 1967.

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. London: Routledge, 1982.

Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." 1978. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London: Longmans, 1988. 107-23.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Neal, Larry. "The Black Arts Movement." Drama Review 12.4 (1968): 29-39.

Piggford, George. "Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race." Modern Drama 40.1 (1997): 74-85.

Nita N. Kumar, Professor of English at Shyama Prasad Mukherji College, University of Delhi, has a Ph.D. in African American drama. Her recent publications Include "Black Arts Movement and Ntozake Shange's Choreopoem" (Black Arts Quarterly, 2001) and "Invisible Women in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man" (Indo-American Review, 1999).