White Woman’s Burden: A Stylistic Analysis ofBaraka’s Dutchman

Among Baraka’s best published works the Dutchman can beconsidered as one of his masterpieces. The play attracted the attention ofmany critics and became an interesting topic for many researchers to basetheir works on. However, an area that has been missed out from theirstudies is the analysis of the work with the help of linguistics andstylistics. Application of these methods can be helpful in obtaininginsights to the play; therefore, this study strives to approach the textlinguistically with the help of three concepts including speech act theory,turn taking order, and politeness strategies to examine the power relationsbetween the two major characters of the play: Lula, a white woman andClay, a black man. The methods used for this power-relation analysiswere chosen from Short (). After a detailed analysis of the carefullychosen excerpts from the play, it was concluded that Lula, the whitewomen, is the most dominating character with the most power control inthe text, and Clay is the powerless black man who is exploited and killedby the whites. This study attempted to reveal how the language of theplay confirms this unequal distribution of power and works as a means tohighlight the central discriminating theme of the play