The role thatThe Tempesthas played to articulate colonial relations and, more important, as a site from which to launch anticolonial responses is, by now, a well-surveyed field. From the fairly compendious account of “Colonial Metaphors” in Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan’sShakespeare’s Caliban:A Cultural Historyor Rob Nixon’s much-cited essay “Caribbean and African Appropriations ofThe Tempest” to a number of more specialized treatments, rewritings and deployments ofThe Tempesthave been examined in New World Anglophone and Francophone writing, in Anglo-Canadian, Afro-Canadian, Quebecois, African American, and Latino texts.¹ My aim in the pages that follow is...

Fernando names “Prospero” a monster inWater with Berries(as does Lamming in “A Monster, a Child, a Slave” inPleasures of Exile), invoking the word used most often inThe Tempestto describe Caliban. The transfer to Prospero is heard faintly in the play when Alonso responds to Prospero’s punishing torments with “it is monstrous, monstrous” (3.3.95). The thirty-four uses of “monster” inThe Tempestare unprecedented in Shakespeare’s corpus; no other play has more than half a dozen.¹ This repeated nomination makes Caliban an apt site for monster theory (to recall the title of an anthology edited by...

“Remember, you’re not human”: The film director’s words to Christopher inNo Telephone to Heavenpoint us, once again, to the demonic ground of difference upon which Cliff operates, the terrain claimed by Wynter through the category of “ nigger”/“native” as the “ultimate Conceptual Other” to the human as the “technological master of nature and ostensibly supracultural, autonomous ‘Man’ of the Western bourgeoisie,” the character embodied in Césaire’s Prospero. Can any valuable sense of the human remain after the depredations of colonialism and neocolonialism?¹

InAbeng,in a stunning moment recalled but uncomprehended by Clare, an old, obviously poor, black woman...