Expectation, Melancholy, and Loss: Funnyhouse of a Negro and Dutchman in the Year 1964

Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman were produced in 1964, during a period of paradigm shifts in African American history. This essay examines the plays from the perspective of the historical background and social climate during the epicenter of the civil rights movement. Moreover, the essay argues that the protagonists of the plays were intellectuals beset by conflicting forces that impeded their desires for intellectual accomplishment and achievement. Drawing from previous analyses and personal experience, the essay sheds new light on the plays, the authors, and the meaning of 1964 as a watershed period for the Black Power movement and the struggle for equal rights. The internal and external conflicts arising from the circumstances of 1964 enveloped the characters and fostered a melancholic patina in their psyche. This melancholia is not, as Freud described it, a condition of psychosis, but rather a condition borne of racial inequity and injustice.