Vol. 55 No. 2 (2007)
Research Article

“Hopeless Colored Names” A Taxonomy of Naming and Re-naming Rituals in Baraka's Dutchman

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  • Thomas A. Greenfield and Sarah Pinchoff
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1179/nam.2007.55.2.123

Published 2007-06-01

Copyright (c) 2007 Maney

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Abstract

Even as naming rituals stand among the most persistent themes in African-American literature, Imamu Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, the most important play of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, is singular in the centrality of naming to its dramatic structure and meaning. From the profusion of over thirty-five different names, epithets, and appellations with which Lula (a young white female) and Clay (a young African-American male) manipulate and vitiate each other, we construct a taxonomy of three separate, interconnected naming rituals for analyzing the dramatic functions of naming in Dutchman: an Ethnic Cleansing Ritual, a Sexual and Gender Dissolution ritual, and an Existential Negation ritual. Each naming ritual reveals its own truth about. the overarching conflicts of the drama and, in tandem with the other naming rituals, elucidates Dutchman's links to its predecessors in both canonical African-American writing and modern European existentialist drama.

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References

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