Revolutionary Violence Vs. Passive Resistance: Liberation Strategies in Amiri Baraka’s The Slave and August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Abstract

This paper traces the influence of violence and passive resistance, as two competing modes of postcolonial theory and practice, on two African American plays: Amiri Baraka’s The Slave (1964) and August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988). Freedom of the oppressed African Americans sits at the heart of both plays, but the liberation strategies adopted by the protagonists are totally different. While The Slave suggests that violence is an indispensable tool in the fight for freedom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone focuses on peaceful struggle and spiritual liberation. Analyzing the dilemmas of Walker Vessels in The Slave and Herald Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, subjecting the means and ends of their pursuits to comparative critical analysis, the paper explores the validity of the different paths they take to attain freedom. Through the critical lens of postcolonial theory, the texts are situated within the larger cultural and historical context of African American struggle for freedom, with special reference to Malcolm X’s black power movement influenced by Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary violence theory and Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights Movement inspired by Gandhi’s theory of passive resistance.