Approaches to Teaching Baraka's Dutchman by Matthew Calihman, Gerald Early (review)

CLA JOURNAL 127 Book Reviews Calihman, Matthew and Gerald Early, Eds. Approaches to Teaching Baraka’s Dutchman. Modern Language Association of America, 2018. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781603293556 . $24.00 Paperback. One would have thought a book such as Approaches to Teaching Baraka’s Dutchman might have been published long ago,given Amiri Baraka’s importance within American letters and the central position of this particular play to an understanding both of post World War II American drama and the shifting ideologies of the playwright. There is less surprise that this MLA Series chooses to feature Baraka’s most famous play first. At last check, the series had no volumes dedicated to any artists of the New American Poetry who were Baraka’s chief contemporaries, let alone any poets of the Black Arts Movement. As the editors of the present volume point out, referencing contemporary reviews and other responses, the reactions to Dutchman have been incredibly varied from the outset, and have often seemed to shift with the context in which it is performed. While there were critics who lambasted Baraka’s play upon its initial appearance, it had a remarkable run and was the winner of an Obie Prize. Not that much later, when the play was performed uptown in the context of the Black Arts Movement, many of the same periodicals (though usually not the same critics) were much harsher in their reactions, even as the play was visibly successful with its Harlem audiences. In Harlem, the white characters were played by black actors. Again, one might have thought, given the long history of white actors in blackface, given the great success of Genet’s The Blacks, in which white characters were played by black actors in whiteface, this would have proved familiar to white critics, but not so much. It seems that, like Godot, Dutchman was a sort of screen onto which audiences and critics could project their shifting concerns and anxieties. There was a time when that would have been termed “universal,” but the Black Arts era was not that time. And those features are part of why Dutchman not only has continuing value as a work of art and a subject of study, but why it lends itself so readily to so many differing approaches to teaching the text in the classroom, as evidenced by this volume. The introductory material and apparatus are, for someone like me, the most valuable parts of the book. I think it safe to predict that I will not be the only specialist in Baraka’s work who will learn something from Early and Calihman, despite having read just about every word ever published in English on the subject. Readers could have used a few alerts along the way. The editors mention the study of Baraka by the late Jerry Gafio Watts but fail to caution their audience that Watts’s book is replete with errors, including misidentifying the gender of one of Baraka’s children. The editors do construct a useful history of the play, making appropriate references to Baraka’s autobiographical writings and to those of his first wife. I think many more advanced readers will be fascinated by the underscoring of the difference between the ending of the play as most of us know it, as published in the volume Dutchman and The Slave, and the alternate, earlier version that few have seen. Overall, I think this is one of the better introductions to Baraka’s works for the theater. 128 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews It has often seemed to me that the books chosen for this MLA series serve as an intriguing history of the evolution of classroom literary teaching in America. I wish we could have had more such essays about Dutchman forty or so years ago so that we could track how the ways of working through this play with students have changed over time. My own first viewing of the play came at the height of the Black Power and Black Arts movements, in a student production in the basement of a university building, at a university where nobody at the time was teaching Baraka’s works. Decades later I saw a staged reading...