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Cyclopedia of Literary Places Dutchman Author: Amiri Baraka (Everett LeRoi Jones, 1934- ) Type of Work: Drama Type of Plot: Political Time of Plot: 1960's First Performed: 1964; first published, 1964 All the action in this play takes place within a subway car, rattling under the streets of New York City, on which a white woman named Lula confronts a young black man named Clay. Treatment of "place" is highly symbolic: As a specific location, the city is of secondary importance to the subway, a symbolic subterranean setting in which the deeper realities of American life are dramatized. New York City Literally an "overdrop" for the play, the city serves as both the realistic urban setting for highly charged racial dynamics between black and white Americans in the 1960's and as Amiri Baraka's mythic and symbolic setting for a critique of black consciousness and the Black Arts movement. Subway tunnels Subterranean passageways for the subway trains that symbolize places in which social and psychological realities are exposed in their true terms through interactions between characters moving underneath the surface of American culture. Below ground, violent truths of American history erupt into stark view, with profound consequences for particular human beings who cannot escape to the surface and its delusions of safety. The tunnels also function as metaphorical space: the interior consciousness of "the black artist," who struggles to create (and literally, to survive) in a world controlled by the norms of white Western culture and aesthetics. At this symbolic level, the subterranean tunnel setting of the play is itself the action of the mind of an artist, struggling to freedom. Subway car Train car on which Clay and Lula encounter each other. With its passengers literally pressed into close proximity with one another, the car becomes the site of a compressed narrative of American racial history as it passes through the dark subway tunnels. Within this car, explosive conflicts are framed in harsh light and within sharply delineated space. Clay and Lula are trapped within historical roles and identities, on a stage that is speeding forward into time. The intensely philosophical and politicized violence that unfolds between the two characters is also a social violence shared by other riders when they eventually toss Clay's body off the train. On this level, the car is America, exposed to light. Within the other symbolic space of the play, the mind of the "black artist," the subway car serves as an illuminated moment of sharp insight into the threats posed to black artistic consciousness in America. Sharon Carson |
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