Part I  Calibanic Postcoloniality

I can imagine The Tempest without Ferdinand but not without Caliban. —Russell Hoban, The Moment under the Moment (1992)

he well-known American writer and illustrator Russell Hoban ar- gues about his two-act libretto, “Some Episodes in the History of Miranda and Caliban,” that “Shakespeare didn’t invent Caliban; T 1 Caliban invented Shakespeare....” What he means is that Caliban, like the invention of the “primitive,” preceded and inspired Shakespeare; it was “a necessary idea.” As decolonization proved an absolute necessity by the 1960s, African and Caribbean postcolonial writers as well as European and Latin American dissenting intellectuals came to use the counter-hegemonic idea of Caliban in order to destabilize colonial sets of ideas and call for the deprivi- leging of Prospero-qua-colonizer. Despite the indignant reluctance of some to “parody the imperialists,” it became necessary to wrest from the Shake- speare canon an emblem of postcoloniality and to rewrite The Tempest from Caliban’s perspective. The corollary to the rise of Caliban, both in its insurrectional and ithy- phallic dimension, is inevitably the deprivileging of the Prospero-figure, which occurred as early as the late nineteenth century, most notably with Renan, Rodó, and Guéhenno. As colonized countries struggled for inde- pendence in the 1950s and 1960s, the Prospero-figure got pathologized with D. O. Mannoni, D. G. James, and Philip Mason; and then ultimately blud- geoned by the emergent nationalism of Sithole, Ngugi, Césaire, Fanon, and Memmi. Their texts outline what I call a Calibanic genealogy ranging from Europe to Africa and Latin America to the Caribbean. 10 Tempests after Shakespeare

The rise of Caliban took place in Caribbean literature, with Martiniquan Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête (1969) and Barbadian George Lamming’s Water with Berries (1971). While Edward Kamau Brathwaite, also from Barbados, augurs the move away from the Caliban-Prospero-Ariel troika dear to Cé- saire by retrieving the Sycorax-figure, Guyanese-born David Dabydeen dwells on interracial love between Caliban and Miranda and on the pleasures of permanent exile in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile, Caliban and Pros- pero engage in epiphanic metamorphoses in Australia, the Pacific Islands, and Québec.