earticle

영어

Ritual is discerned not as religion alone, but as a pattern conceived for the purpose of healing and rejuvenating a specific community. African-American artists facilitate the paradoxical process of refusing Western models through African ritual, what really turns out to be a denial of, and reaction against, Euro-Western archetypes. Baraka adopts ritual characteristics in his drama, The Slave. He has every intention that his theatre may have an explicit social message to arouse audiences’ social awareness and move that audience to social action. What is characteristic and problematic in employing ritual elements in The Slave is that Baraka presents Walker’s journey of revolutionary war only to fail. Walker’s final transformation at the end of the play is an old negro slave. His transformation process is retrospective and backward to the past slavery era. The failure of a protagonist in The Slave might foretell that of a playwright, Baraka, who tried to wade through the polluted history and immature community of the African-Americans in the 1960s.