ABSTRACT
In 1964, the African-American poet Amiri Baraka, then still known as LeRoi Jones, premiered his first play Dutchman in New York. The one-act drama, a searing dialogue between a white woman and a black man traveling a metro car ending in the woman coolly murdering the man, created quite a stir, and today is regarded as landmark of Black Arts Movement. Gothic drama and tales of terror kept Gothic in the popular imagination during the early nineteenth century, after the first wave of gothic novels started to fall away. Besides the use of technology, the combination of acting and music importantly contributed to a convincing staging of the supernatural. The part of Vanderdecken, the Flying Dutchman, was played by famous actor and superintendent, T. P. Cooke. By 1820 the British government initiated a settler policy for the Cape, mostly inspired by the economic crisis and huge unemployment at home, and in order to avoid having to introduce more radical reforms.
