Trauma and Turbulence in African American Drama: Amiri Baraka’s The Slave

Exploring Trauma and Turbulence in African American Drama

Abstract

The vision of the African American studies on drama has undergone a major transformation with the passage of time. The strategy and approach of the writers focus on the questions concerning the survival of Blacks in contemporary times and their future prospects. The writers highlight the dreadful white reality that holds a modern Black captive and victim. Ed Bullins, a prominent figure in African American Drama exerts a substantial impact on the subsequent development of the tradition. At present, Black writers turn away from addressing anticipated readership and appealing the plight of Blackness in America, and the Black literature has changed from a social-protest oriented form to one of the dialectical nature of the Black people—Black Dialectics. This new thrust has two main aspects dialectic of change and dialectic of experience. These are the two major fields in the mainstream of new Black creativity. The dialectic of change, once called protest writing when confronting whites directly and angrily, altered to what was called Black revolutionary writing. The dialectic of experience is the writings of being of being a Black. These writings emerge from painful and precarious situations of Blacks.