Fighting Fire with Fire

This chapter explores revolutionary violence in 1960s Black American political movements by examining the literature of the period, namely Amiri Barak’s Dutchman (1964) and Slave Ship: A Historical Pageant (1967). It looks at representations of violence in these plays and considers them alongside Frantz Fanon’s theorization of violence in Black liberation movements as cathartic and redemptive. It then concludes by assessing the extent to which depictions of violence in both plays can be read as representations of the true nature of race and racism in America and as solutions to these problems.