SOURCE: "Looking into Black Skulls: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and the Psychology of Race," in Modern Drama, Vol. XL, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 74-82.

In the following essay, Piggford explores Baraka's psychological analysis of black American men in Dutchman.

Houston A. Baker, Jr. has rightly observed [in The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism, 1980] that "the radical chic denizens of Bohemia [and] the casual liberals of the academy" have never recognized LeRoi Jones's/Amiri Baraka's achievement as a playwright and a poet because his "brilliantly projected conception of black as country—a separate and progressive nation with values antithetical to those of white America—stands in marked contrast to the ideas set forth by Baldwin, Wright. Ellison, and others in the fifties." That is, according to the integrationist politics that continue to dominate discussions of race in the United States, what we might in the 1990s call the...