Post-colonial reading of The Tempest

  Assignment

Name : Virani Dhara 

Course: M. A. English

Semester: 3

Batch: 2019-2021

Roll No: 4

Submitted to: Smt S. B. Gardi Department of English. 

Paper no : 12

Subject: The Post-colonial Literature. 

Topic: Post-colonial reading of The Tempest

#Introduction:

      Une Tempête is a 1969 play by Aime Cesaire. It is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest from a post-colonial perspective. The play was first performed at the Festival d'Hammamet in Tunisia under the direction of Jean-Marie Serreau. It later played in Avignon and Paris. Césaire uses all of the characters from Shakespeare's version, but he specifies that Prospero is a white master, while Ariel is a mulatto and Caliban is a black slave. These characters are the focus of the play as Césaire foregrounds issues of race, power, and decolonization. 

So, first of all let’s know about what is post – colonial reading or theory before we go to read the work of Shakespeare “The Tempest” with glance of post-colonial reading. 

# Post-colonial Theory

• Post-colonial theory focus on the reading and writing of literature written in previously or current colonized countries. The literature is composed of colonizing countries that deals with colonization or colonized peoples.

• It’s also a critical observations of former colonies of the Western powers and how they relate to, and interact with, the rest of the world. 

• Greatly interested in the cultures of the 

Colonizer and the colonized, post-colonial theory seeks to critically investigate what happens when two cultures clash and one of them ideologically fashions itself as superior and assumes dominance and control over the other. 

# Post-colonial reading of the Tempest

 Post-colonial reading of The Tempest were inspired by the decolonisation movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. 

What was Shakespeare’s response to stereotypes of race and religion? Post-colonial criticism is a method of analysis that addresses questions of analysis that addresses questions of racial identity and 

Equality, and also of gender equity via two main modes of inquiry. First, it investigated how Shakespeare’s plays relate to the social codes and conventions defined non-European and non-Christian people and races they encountered. Second, it explores the more recent history of the reception of Shakespearian drama within non- western societies and setting-in Africa, India, the Caribbean, and Latin America. 

   Thus, post-colonial criticism of a play like Othello not draws our attention to Renaissance attitudes toward Moors, Africans, and Turks, among others, but it also examines how the play may have been interpreted and performed in countries involved in recent colonial and post-colonial struggles, for example in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. This process was, of course, a complex one. On the one hand, Shakespeare was an export to the colonies of European literature and language as a part of their policy of cultural domination. On the other hand, it also enabled the colonized groups to revise and remake Shakespeare’s works in ways which related to their own social conditions. 

# Early post-colonial responses to The Tempest

Until the advent of post-colonial criticism, Anglo-American critics frequently read The Tempest as an allegory about artistic creation. Since this was once considered to be Shakespeare’s final play, Prospero has been defined as a surrogate playwright, shaping the main action through his magic. Starting with the artificial tempest of the opening scene, Prospero directs, rewards, and punishes the main characters according to his  plan, which is to marry his daughter, Miranda, to Ferdinand, the son and their to the Duke of Naples, his former enemy. This plan is considered his revenge for his forcible exile from his own kingdom. In leading to this desired union of Naples and Milan, Prospero obstructs the advances of Caliban, the native of the island where he and Miranda are exiled. Furthermore, Prospero's magical power not only ensures the enslavement of Caliban, but also demands the servitude of a sprite named Ariel to put his magical designs into action. Overall, in this commonly accepted reading of The Tempest, Prospero emerges as an all-knowing, benevolent patriarch and artistic creator whose motives are beyond reproach. Since the play is a romance in terms of its genre, its plot was generally approached as a fanciful tale with little connection to the history of the period or its aftermath.

This long tradition of privileging Prospero's creative powers as beneficent and god-given began to be overshadowed by the growing stature of Caliban, following the de-colonisation movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. If, traditionally, Prospero's art represented the world of civility and learning in contrast to the 'natural' black magic of Caliban's mother Sycorax, anti-colonial revisions of the play challenged this rather abstract Eurocentric division between art and nature. Instead, as Africans and Caribbeans saw that widespread national liberation was imminent – that is from 1959 onwards – they began to revise and mobilise the play in defence of Caliban's right to the island on which he is born prior to Prospero's arrival. Caliban's assertion in the play, ‘This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me’ (1.2.331–32), became the rallying cry for African and Caribbean intellectuals from the 1960s to the 1970s.

For instance, Aimé Césaire, a black writer and activist from Martinique, re-wrote Shakespeare's play in 1969 in French. Une Tempête (translated into the English A Tempest in 1985) celebrates Caliban's verbal attacks on Prospero and questions the latter's claims to the island. Set in a colony – a prototype of a Caribbean or African setting – in the throes of resistance and unrest, Césaire's play focusses initially on Caliban's resistance to Prospero's control over language. Here, Césaire is clearly sensitive to the way in which the name Caliban/Cannibal appears in Shakespeare's play and in colonial history as a cultural stereotype for the natives of the New World. Accompanying Caliban's challenge to language are references to an actual guerrilla movement and an impending black independence. And Ariel, who is labelled a 'mulatto' in this play, represents the mixed races more able to accept their limited oppression. Overall, this play characterises the changes undergone by the figure of Caliban in productions of the play: in 18th- and 19th-century European productions he was represented as a primitive or 'missing link' from Darwin's theory (i.e. a being in between apes and humans in the evolutionary process). However, with the advent of national liberation of the non-European races, as in Césaire's play, Caliban was widely depicted as a defiant subject under European rule, or simply an embodiment of any oppressed group.

Such identifications with Caliban and an accompanying unease about his alien language typify numerous Latin American and Caribbean responses to the play in the wake of decolonisation in the 1960s. In Africa too, the play became a site for anti-colonial responses, such as the novel A Grain of Wheat (1967), by Kenyan Ngugi Wa Thiong'o. This work, however, does not focus on Caliban's potential resistance. Rather, it examines the nature of Prospero's colonising drives and methods.

Overall, whether one considers The Tempest as an allegory of Caliban's liberation or of Prospero's colonial paternalism, post-colonial readings of the play's reception in the developing world clearly establish that we can no longer recuperate The Tempest as a historically 'innocent' text, uncorrupted by later historical readings.

The Tempest as an allegory of European discovery and colonisation

Given these changing responses to Shakespeare's The Tempest in the former 'Third World', it is not surprising that by the 1980s, Anglo-American readings of the play began to join in such interrogations of Prospero's rule and in empathy for Caliban. In doing so, post-colonial criticism in the West was somewhat belated in acknowledging the significance of the play's historical background.

Since the 1980s, burgeoning post-colonial criticism has brought new light to bear upon the play's sources in the narratives of 'discovery' and colonisation of the Americas. Most critics agree that Shakespeare used Elizabethan travel writing, both for his dramatisation of the opening storm and shipwreck and his depiction of the European confrontation with a 'savage', Caliban. In particular, he drew on William Strachey's account written in 1610 –probably circulating in unpublished form – of the shipwreck and redemption of Sir Thomas Gates's expedition in the Bermudas in 1609, while on his way to Jamestown in the Virginia colony established by the British. Gates was wrecked in a most dreadful tempest on an island that proved to be so habitable and rich in food that his men were reluctant to leave. Thus, one strand of post-colonial criticism follows the play's journey literally to the European 'discovery' and settlement of the Americas. In that context, critics note how the figure of Caliban easily merges into the image of the cannibal, the mythical 'savage' whom many European travellers claimed to have encountered. Fantasies of real and imagined cannibals in the Renaissance gave an important impetus to European ventures of bringing 'civilisation' to the natives. Images of otherness evoked by the play, however, also suggest an ambiguous geography, whereby the shipwrecked travellers in the play are supposedly travelling to North Africa, across the Mediterranean.

Such a post-colonial focus on The Tempest's relation to geographical exploration – with an emphasis on the colonisation of the Americas – produces a reading of the play that differs radically from traditional European validations of Prospero's dominant role. It calls for a reappraisal of Prospero's and Caliban's competing views of history and settlement of the island. According to Prospero, Caliban's mother was the ‘damned witch Sycorax' who 'For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible / To enter human hearing, from Algiers, ... was banished' to this island (1.2.263–65). When Prospero recounts this story to Ariel, the sprite in his servitude, he makes sure to remind Ariel of the distinction between Sycorax's evil magic and his own supposedly benevolent arts. 

It is this rendition of history that became the battle cry for the anti-colonial movements in Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America – a rendition that became the staple of many revisions and appropriations of Shakespeare's play in these regions. While the play was written in 17th-century England, post-colonial criticism takes the play outwards towards its complicated transactions between European and African and Caribbean cultures in the succeeding centuries. Post-colonial criticism in the West has mined this new archive of the reception history of Shakespeare's The Tempest, questioning, once again, all normative ideas of a 'common humanity', while articulating, as Shakespeare did, the voices of the seemingly marginal characters in Prospero's grand designs. 

# conclusion:

  In short, Shakespeare’s The Tempest is the work, which can be read with post-colonial perspective, how it’s works and what are the aspects of situation of post-colonial in Africa.

 Work citations:

Shakespeare, William, Virginia Mason Vaughan, and Alden T. Vaughan. The tempest. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000. Print. 

Cesaire, Aime. A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller. Ubu Repertory Theatre publication, 1992.