Caliban and Ariel Write Back

Summary

It is no coincidence that the now hugely influential reading of The Tempest in the context of ‘the discourse of colonialism’ began for the purposes of the Anglo-American academy with Stephen Greenblatt’s essay ‘Learning to Curse’, published in 1976, in a book called First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old which explicitly marked – in troubled fashion – the bicentenary of the American Declaration of Independence. As was the case more recently in Australia, official celebrations of a young nation’s coming to the age of two hundred released an anguished cry from the liberal intelligentsia as they came to full realization of the exploitation and oppression on which their nation was built. Fashionable criticism is interested in assuaging the guilt of empire by making the author of The Tempest a scapegoat. But I find it mildly ironic that very few of the ‘radical’ critics of the 1970s and 1980s have acknowledged that a revisionary reading of The Tempest had already been undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s by non-white non-Europeans. I have to admit to my shame that I have been much longer familiar with the ‘new historicist’ readings of anguished Stefanos like Stephen Greenblatt, Stephen Orgel and Steven Mullaney than with the remarkable creative work done a generation before them by self-proclaimed Calibans like George Lamming, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire and Roberto Fernández Retamar.