White Woman’s Burden: A Stylistic Analysis of Baraka’s Dutchman

Among Baraka’s best published works the Dutchman can be considered as one of his masterpieces. The play attracted the attention of many critics and became an interesting topic for many researchers to base their works on. However, an area that has been missed out from their studies is the analysis of the work with the help of linguistics and stylistics. Application of these methods can be helpful in obtaining insights to the play; therefore, this study strives to approach the text linguistically with the help of three concepts including speech act theory, turn taking order, and politeness strategies to examine the power relations between the two major characters of the play: Lula, a white woman and Clay, a black man. The methods used for this power-relation analysis were chosen from Short (). After a detailed analysis of the carefully chosen excerpts from the play, it was concluded that Lula, the white women, is the most dominating character with the most power control in the text, and Clay is the powerless black man who is exploited and killed by the whites. This study attempted to reveal how the language of the play confirms this unequal distribution of power and works as a means to highlight the central discriminating theme of the play.