“A Ghost of the Future”: Racial (Mis)perception and Black Subjectivity in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

This chapter offers a reading of Amiri Baraka's 1964 play, Dutchman, focusing on its use of race icons to engage with white liberal response to racial uplift ideology and its implications for black subjectivity. The chapter considers Rashid Johnson's restaging of Dutchman and his assertion that his project creates an opportunity to find identity somewhere between “the narrative of struggle and the narrative of Negro Exceptionalism,” noting that it resonates in Baraka's (aka LeRoi Jones) contention that the struggle is as much about “the right to choose.” The chapter challenges claims that Dutchman relies upon essentialized blackness and the degradation of white femininity in order to prop up the identity of the African American protagonist, Clay. Instead, it argues that the play unpacks whiteness's investment in uplift ideology by employing a variety of cultural genealogies and practices to sketch identity, thus exposing the vulnerabilities of the African American Freedom Struggle era iterations of uplift ideology.