Transcript Dutchman by Leroi Jones

POTENTIAL SUSPECTS WANTED! BY “THE
MAN”
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d t o s e e t h i s p i c t u re .
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d t o s e e th i s p i c t u re .
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d to s e e th i s p i c t u re .
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d t o s e e t h i s p i c t u re .
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d t o s e e t h i s p i c t u re .
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a r e n e e d e d t o s e e th i s p i c tu re .
Alleged Crime: Taping a University Professor W/O Explicit Permission….
Does Ryan care?: Not really. I only care if your fellow students care. Your fellow students may grant you
amnesty, you may be innocent, or this could all be a doubly-conscious hoax. Nevertheless, will these
eight suspects come to front of the room immediately.
But it’s a rule.
So, if you taped (which four here pictured did do and I have a picture of you doing it), please send me a
copy of that tape and I will put it on the blog along with today’s lecture (which I am filming and putting on
the blog so that you can review it),
Dutchman (1964)
by
Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
A Modern Myth of Assimilation
Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
YADIGSHONUFF!
Or does it explode?
Full Speed After Daytona
The History of Black Drama: What We’ve Seen and Done so Far……..
1)
Why does Houston Baker turn to the concepts of the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery
I want to suggest that a compete expressive modernity was achieved only when the “Harlem Renaissance” gave way to what might be called—following
the practices of Anglo-American and British Moderns—’renaisancism.’ By this term I mean to suggest a spirit of nationalistic engagement that begins
with intellectuals, artists, and spokespersons at the turn of the century and receives extensive definition and expression during the 1920’s. This sprirt is
one that prompts black artist’s awareness that his or her only possible foundation for authentic and modern expressivity resides in the discursive field
marked by formal master and sounding deformation. Further I want to suggest that “Renaissancism”connotes something quite removed from a single,
exotic set of failed high jinks confined to less than a decade. It signals in fact a resonantly and continuously productive set of tactics, strategies, and
syllables that takes its form at the turn of the century and extends to our own day.” Houston Baker
1)
Then do European principles and aesthetics apply to theatre written by African-Americans of modernity? Why or
Why not?
ANSWER-DEPENDS ON WHO’S the F#CK iIS APPLYING THEM!
Does the treatise composed at Golden Pond hold water? Why and Why not? (Can African American Theatre in your estimation, so far, be
defined by a concrete set of definable aesthetics different from those of Anglo-American theater?
ANSWER: YES AND NO BECAUSE IT’S TAXANOMIC-----BUT! It will always be retrospective and, for many, restrictive. Do revolutionaries like
give a flying-mutha-f*ck about rules?
QUESTION: What makes these revolutionaries uniquely different from “American,” French, Soviet, and/or Chinese Revolutionaries?
Rut roh…. Tut-a-tut-tutt-EVERYMUTHAF*CKNTHANG!
The History of Black Drama consists of innovative (infinite?) deformative (nation based discursive strategies of masking and sounding) discursive
strategies that are always mixtures of the mastery of form and the deformation of mastery
The “History so Far” of Black Drama in the 20th century (geographically, movement-wise, and with respect to author)
Slave-ship Performance Plantation Performance and Ritual, Minstrelsy, The Pulpit Space (Escape…. By William Wells Brown), Proscenium
Performance (The Black minstrel Show, In Dahomey, by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Black-Realism to Black Modernism? (Depends)- Mulatto to
A Raisin in the Sun by Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry.
Any verlapping themes?: black nationalism, black internationalism, double consciousness with respect to the actor’s paradox, a hyper-Burden of
representativity and… what else? MARXISM, MASKING, CODING, COMMUNING
Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement
“Sellout” Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their dinner
jackets/ their starched shirts/ and detachable
collars/ their monocles and/ their bowler hats
……………….
I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a pimp/ like a
murdere ramong them/ my hands hideously
red/ with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-za-tion
The Dissemination of the
Polemics of Negritude in English
Key Dates
Aimé Cesairé’s Discourse on Colonialism (English translation
1953)
Franz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth transl. Constance
Farrington (1963 translation of the 1961 book: New York, Grove)
Damas
Leroi Jones and The poem of B.A.M.
Points
Black Art
1)
Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?
2)
Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubbule?
Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)
2)
To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness
Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation
Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression that murders
blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka, makes a
community stagnant, incapable of producing leaders or innovators.
And yet, it is a passivity whose transgression results in self-destruction
(perhaps of a positive variety, but more than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman, Dutch Slave Ships, the
subway or “flying underbelly of the city”
Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music
The B.A.M and Fanon
Neal on Fanon
•
.
Henderson on Fanon
(The Harlem Renaissance comes home to
Roost)
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Understanding the New Black Poetry –
p. 19-20
Whether the masses of Black people accept this
position, the first one, or some other, the cultural
dimension of the event lies in the fact that Black
writing-not only the works of Malcolm X and
Fanon, but the poetry of Etheridge Knight and Don
L. Lee and Claude McKay-had helped to shape the
prisoners’ new values, had increased their selfesteem and sharpened their political awareness, just
as it has affected a whole generation of black
college students on all levels. Ironically, for it
shows with graphic precision the arrogant
ignorance which established institutions have of the
Black arts Movement, and, deeper, of Black history
and aspirations—ironically, a Time magazine story
which purported to be an in-depth study of the
rebellion noted that Black prisoners were inspired
by original writings by the prisoners themselves,
among which was “ a poem written by an unknown
prisoner, crude but touching in its would-be heroic
style” (Time, Sept. 7, 1971, p. 20). And in
demonstration of what he meant, the Time writer
included the opening lines of Claude McKay’s
famous sonnet, “If We Must Die.”
"If We Must Die”
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow
!What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’lll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
Assimilationism and Exceptionalism
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.
Talking Points:
1)Costume (on and off
stage)
2)Prescribed modes of
revolt.
3)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
4)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle
Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”
The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black
Aesthetic
Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,
The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a
separate black aesthetic is not
only out of step with current leftist
moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the
outgrowth of a failure to come to
terms with what might constitute
a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older
than the “race problem,” but its
privileging of light over dark was
mapped onto race relations.
The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics
3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”
Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain
A Theoretical Approach to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama
consists of innovative (infinite?)
deformative (nation based
discursive strategies of masking
and sounding) discursive strategies
that are always mixtures of the
mastery of form and the
deformation of mastery
the mastery of form
The deformation of mastery
Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Qu i c k T i m e ™ a n d a
d e c o m p re s s o r
a re n e e d e d t o s e e th i s p i c tu re .
Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s there for you
to see.
CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.
Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production
A Henry Louis Gastesish approach to African American
Theater
Mitchell-Kernan’s summary of the defining characteristics of “Signifying as a Form of Verbal
Art” helps to clarify the most difficult, and elusive, mode of rhetoric. We can outline these
characteristics for convenience. The most important defining features of Signifyin(g) are
“indirect intent” and “metaphorical reference.” This aspect of indirection is a formal device, and
“appears to be purely stylistic”; moreover, “itss art characteristics remain in the forefront.�
Signifyin(g), in other words, turns upon the foregrounding of the Signifier. By 妬ndirection�
Mitchell-Kernan means “That the correct semantic (referential interpretation) or significance of
the utterance cannot be arrive at by a consideration of the dictionary meaning of the lexical items
involved and the syntactic rules for their combination alone. The apparent significance of the
message differs from its real significance. The apparent meaning of the sentence signifies its
actual meaning.”The relationship between latent and manifest is a curious one, as determined by
the formal properties of the Signifin(g) utterance, In one of several ways, manifested meaning
directs attention away from itself to another, latent level of meaning. We might compare this
relationship to that which obtains between the two parts of metaphor, tenor (the inner meaning)
and vehicle (the outer meaning).
Signifin(g), according to Mitchell-Kernan, operates so delightfully because “apparent meaning
serves as a key which directs hearers to some shared knowledge, attitudes, and values or signals
that reference must produced “metaphorically,” The decoding of the figurative, she continues,
depends “upon shared knowledge” and “this shared knowledge operates on two levels.” One of
these two levels is that the speaker and the audience realize that “The signifying is occurring and
that the dictionary-syntactical meaning of the utterance is to be ignored.” In addition, a silent
second text, as it were, which corresponds rightly to what Michell-Kernanis calling “shared
knowledge,” must be brought to bear upon the manifest content of the speech act and “employed
in the reinterpretation of the utterance.” Indeed, this is of the utmost importance in the esthetics
of Signifyin(g), for “It is the cleverness used in directing the attention of the hearer and the
audience to the shared knowledge upon which a speaker’s artistic talent is judged.” Signifyin(g),
in other words, depends upon the success of the signifier at invoking an absent meaning
ambiguously “present” in a carefully wrought statement.
Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the Signifying
Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.