The Logic of Retribution: Amiri Baraka's "Dutchman"

Abstract

Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African 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 art and life was a direct one (102). place of the sociopolitical and empirical binarism of and white, Gates advocates understanding in the postmodernist terms of a trope in which the categories of and white are not preconstituted. Amiri Baraka's work has been seen, from this postmodernist position, as advocating an essentialist and unproblematic conception of identity. This essay attempts rethink the question of Baraka's binarism. 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. his essays and theoretical pronouncements Baraka sets up a fixed, non-dialectic opposition between and white, and the categories have the double load of racial and metaphysical meaning. white Western usage of as a signifier of evil, death, and darkness is directly reversed, and white is made carry the suggestions of sickness, death, and absence. When we analyze blackness in Baraka, we realize that it is both the goal be passionately struggled for, and the innate being of the African American. impassioned rhetoric that is built up in Baraka's essays around the terms 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 Blackness, says Baraka in The Legacy of Malcolm X (Home 248). If blackness is both the natural and the ideal state, then the term evidently is not definitive, and needs be defined. charge of Baraka's propounding black essentialism also needs further examination, since the polarization of white and 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 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 build culture and consciousness. white is repeatedly described as evil, sick, and dying, and the creation of a positive consciousness is crucially linked the declaration of white culture as evil and insane. In a time of chaos, in a time of trouble, we're asking for unity, unity as defense against these mad white people who continue run the world (Baraka, Home 234). 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 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, 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 nationalism in the middle and late 1960s, needs 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. …