Baraka’s Revolutionary Theatre: The Role of Culture in the Black Identity Construction in Select Plays
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Amiri Baraka’s (formerly LeRoi Jones) seems to be persuaded that diasporian blacks constitute an entity. This entity has historic rootedness, as well as a distinct culture. From 1967 onwards, the dramatist appears to be conscious of the status of the black culture as an ‘other’ culture. He is thought to consider the culture of black people as, in Homi K. Bhabha’s phrase, ‘a body of difference.’ In Baraka’s thought, culture is constantly associated with the idea of nation and nationhood. This ineluctably sets up a pattern of differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. This nation-centred perspective makes culture become the principal provider of identity. In this context, a nationalist culture is contrived to chase deculturation and to withstand ‘cultural mummification’ in an effort to construct what Homi K. Bhabha labels a ‘liberatory, non-repressed identity’. Therefore, the assertion of black cultural distinctiveness becomes a necessity dictated by an emergent cultural identity. On becoming blacker, Baraka accepts the blackness of black people and considers it as a locus of difference. In the different plays under examination, the characters of Madheart, A Black Mass, and, to a certain extent, Death Unit, endeavour to cultivate a sense of cultural cohesion and compatibility based on sameness. The play The Slave exposes the processual espousal of a cultural identity in the person of Walker Vessels. Specifically, Madheart outlines that effort on the part of Black Man to preach for cultural membership and belonging. The nationalist message consists in the construction of a front for the embracement of an identity predicated on culture. Drawing on the works of Charles Taylor and Will Kymlicka, this chapter seeks to spell out is how culture, in an era of modernity known for being a time of crisis of belonging, becomes designator of black identity, and in what ways it resists exclusion and stereotypification grounded in mainstream monoculturalism. The chapter also attempts to explicate how blackness constitutes a site of difference amid conflictual cultural connections and desired rootedness.