Battles for Identity and Dignity ： Dutchmαn and Other Black Plays in the Sixties

Abstract

From the beginning, life for the black Americans has been extremely difficult. For almost two and a half centuries before 1863，the year the Emancipation Proclamation was announced by US President Abraham Lincoln, more than ninety percent of all the blacks living in the United States were forced to live out their lives within a brutal and degrading system of slavery that openly declared that the blacks were not human beings but merely things, pieces of property. Tragically enough, no fundamental discontinuity was brought about in the black experience after Emancipation. Even today complete freedom physicallyand spiritually is not secured for all black people, and it is precisely this lack of genuine freedom then and now, consistently the essential and unique characteristic of African-Americans' life in America, that provides stuff for great literature. In this paper six plays all produced in the 1960s dealing with the theme of black identity have been chosen in order to see how the issue has been dealt with by black play-wrights of prominence.