On Violence, Race and the Defiance of Traditional Gender Roles in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman

  • Arnab Chatterjee
Keywords: literary journals India, online English research journal, research papers publisher, UGC approved journal, High impact factor journal, Peer reviewed literary journal

Abstract

The construction of gender and the resultant ‘roles’ that it plays or is meant to play in a semiotic system has garnered much challenging vistas of critical investigation in feminist and queer theory. Following Butler’s famous remark that “gender is performative” and does not have a pristine, transcendental identity of its own, much of the debate lies on the ‘porous’ areas that outline gender. Thus to be aggressive is masculine and docility being a hallmark of feminine charm is no longer tenable. Following this cue, this proposed paper would try to critically investigate this act of “straddling” across gender and sexual ‘norms’ from the vantage point of Amiri Baraka’s acclaimed play Dutchman (1964). Racially oriented, and having a somewhat Pinteresque setting, the play shows two characters, the white female seductress Lula and the black victim Clay engaged in a game of power and the gradual effort to wrest a territory of their own, that reverses the traditional notions of gender performativity. Lula would go to any limits to be as aggressive as she can be, to the point of being a white murderess as the play shows, while Clay would initially be more concerned saving his petite, middle class bourgeoisie image and would resort to violence on a mere verbal level only in the last resort. The play is interesting not only because it portrays race relations in the then racist America, but also because the characters while beleaguered by questions of race and ethnicity perform their gender specific ‘roles’ in a way that may be of interest to feminists and queer theorists who would increasingly refuse to assign a defining ‘center’ to these terms.

Keywords: Gender, Performative, Behavioral, Role.

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Author Biography

Arnab Chatterjee

Arnab Chatterjee is presently a Junior Research Fellow (U.G.C.) in The Department of English and Culture Studies at The University of Burdwan, West Bengal. He is also the Assistant Editor (Honorary) of Poetry Today, published by Poets Foundation, Kolkata, and formerly guest faculty at The Department of English, Kalyani University and DDE Rabindra Bharati University. Author of three poetry books In Desolate Dwellings, Residence Beneath the Earth (Amazon) and The Wind in the Abyss (also called The Reflections Trilogy), Arnab is a member of many national and international societies like the MLA, USA and The Sahitya Akademi (“Who’s Who of Indian Writers”) and has presented research papers in national and international conferences.

Published
2016-05-05
How to Cite
Chatterjee, A. “On Violence, Race and the Defiance of Traditional Gender Roles in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman”. Contemporary Literary Review India, Vol. 3, no. 2, May 2016, pp. 59-67, https://literaryjournal.in/index.php/clri/article/view/236.
Section
Research Papers