The Tempest Revisited in Martinique: Aimé Césaire's Shakespeare

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how Aimé Césaire in Une tempête d'après de Shakespeare proceeds along the colonizer/colonized lines of Shakespeare's composition. The difference between the two playwrights, however, is that Shakespeare was problematizing the colonizer/colonized relationship for his strictly English (i.e. colonizer) audience, while Césaire was writing for both the colonizers and the colonized. And though there are differences in the way the playwrights thought out the problem of master-slave relations, there is a striking similarity in how they expounded this relationship of Magician-Duke and Monster-Slave. Only the slave who desires freedom resists the master. It is this very relationship of resistance that must be discussed. Because Césaire was unabashedly Hegelian in his thinking, and because Shakespeare's understanding of the master/slave relationship was Hegelian avant la lettre, the study takes a Hegelian line of thought as its core, specifically Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (most notably, chapter 1). Central to this reading is the fact that in order to become free the slave must engage the master in mortal combat. But having the slave die would symbolize the perpetual oppression and death of all colonized peoples, and so neither author allows Caliban to die. In order to highlight today's postcolonial reality, Césaire extends this theme further: by not killing Caliban, and by remaining on the island, Prospero admits that his own being is defined by the Other, his slave.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.