African American Violent Resistance in Ted Shine's Contribution

Abstract

This paper contends that the African American play, Ted Shine's Contribution (1969), was written as a violent reaction to the Civil Rights Movement in the sixties relying on the fact that the African American race is the Master Race as a reaction to, and subversion of the white Master Race ideology. Although Nihilism was firstly introduced by Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862) and employed by Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1866) to introduce the concept of the Superman, they stretched their influence to the Revolutionary Theatre which stems from the sixties Black Arts Movement, whose father, Amiri Baraka, incited violence. Contribution was not merely a product of this bloody movement as this play, in application, was impacted by Nihilism, the concept of the Superman as well as Utilitarianism in an attempt to assert the fact that the African American race is the Master Race.