The Metamorphoses of Caliban

Monegal, Emir Rodríguez

doi:10.2307/464886

Cited by 9 publications

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“…For him, the idol to be desacralized in the Latin American context are those "stiff, self-conscious and finally inauthentic onejs] produced by these black-painted Spanish American followers of Europe." 22 In other words, apologists for the sexual and intellectual repressiveness of the Castro regime such as Roberto Fernandez Retamar reinscribe retrogressive conservative values stretching back to Roman Catholic and Spanish colonialist domination, yet mask their oppressiveReina lo Arenas' Prose 47 ness by socialist revolutionary rhetoric and Eurocentric-elitist scholarly appropriations of the Caliban debate. 23 Queer cultural cannibalism in the Americas is thus not a unitary referent but is fragmented by these political differences; in Arenas' case by his queer status as a "non-person" within Castro's regime and his carnivalesque, indigenous peasant aesthetic.…”

Section: Prose Studiesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Queer territories in the Americas: Reinaldo Arenas’ prose

Mehuron

1994

Prose Studies

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Section: Prose Studiesmentioning

confidence: 98%

Queer territories in the Americas: Reinaldo Arenas’ prose

Mehuron

1994

Prose Studies

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“…Caliban's ill-fated rebellion in the face of the superior power of Prospero becomes emblematic of early efforts at liberation by colonized populations [Sanchez 1976,^ Monegal 1977, Interpreting the play with Caliban as hero even led Cesaire to write his own version of The Tempest in which Caliban successfully overturns foreign domination and becomes king of his island [1969]. Not an intruder, he is rather an autochthon, as natural to the island as the earth with which Prospero disparagingly identifies him.…”

Section: Iiii167-173mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed the play can be read as a parable of Western imperialism and native subjugation. Caliban's ill-fated rebellion in the face of the superior power of Prospero becomes emblematic of early efforts at liberation by colonized populations [Sanchez 1976,^ Monegal 1977, Interpreting the play with Caliban as hero even led Cesaire to write his own version of The Tempest in which Caliban successfully overturns foreign domination and becomes king of his island [1969].…”

Section: Victor Turner In His Seminal Book the Ritual Process Addrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the Idea of Savagery

Glazier

1982

Cent Issues Anthropol

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The European response to new geographical and ethnographic information in Renaissance travel literature is explored. Using Shakespeare T s The Tempest and Montaigne T s essays, the paper also examines depictions of the savage as an individual and savagery as a social form in order to compare artistic to more avowedly empirical representations. The views of the dramatist and the essayist are related to the modern anthropological perspective .The dramatic world of The Tempest suggests rich and varied anthropological themes such as politics and rebellion, witchcraft and magic, natural design and cultural order. But perhaps of most fundamental interest is the idea of savagery and the savage, for in these primitivist concerns Shakespeare probes the very first questions which modern anthropology asked at its inception. During the course of more than a century prior to 1610, the probable date of the writing of The Tempest, sailors, missionaries, adventurers, and others brought back to Europe reports, usually fragmentary and highly sensational, of strange peoples practicing such bizarre customs as human sacrifice and cannibalism. But Europeans who never ventured to sea were not limited to travellers* accounts about people in the new lands, for even at the beginning of the voyages, kidnapped Indians and Africans were brought to Europe for kings and commoners to marvel over. For example, on the return from his first voyage, Columbus brought 7 Arawak-speaking Indians to the royal court of Spain. Montaigne, whose essay, "Of Cannibals," is an important source for The Tempest, talked with kidnapped Brazilian Indians in Rouen in 1554. In 1565, people abducted from the New World, Ethiopia, Egypt, and other places were displayed in Bordeaux in a specially constructed village outside the city walls [Hodgen 1964:112], Indeed, Montaigne may well have been present for this event, which celebrated Charles IX's visit to the city [Sayce 1972:91], In II.ii.32-34, Trinculo refers to such exhibitions when he says that in England when they will not give a doit to relieve a lane beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian [Kermode 1964). 1 And so it went through the 16th century. A growing awareness of exotic peoples, although most often based on a grotesque distortion of ethnographic and biological fact, excited the European imagination, and took shape, of course, in Caliban and the dramatic landscape of his island.But what kind of people were these inhabitants of the newly discovered lands? Were they capable of virtuous, Christian living? Were they people sharing a common humanity with Europeans, or were they instead people with their own distinct origin? Or perhaps they weren T t people at all but rather curious creatures intermediate between people and the higher animals? Although questions such as these are no longer relevant owing to the progress of the last 200 years of anthropological science, these enigmas vexed people of learning in Shakespeare T s time. As we begin to understand, through The Tempest, 16th and 17th century i...

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Petrograd/Leningrad – Havana – Beijing 1917–1991; or, Marxist Theory and Socialist Practice

Hitchcock¹

2017

A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory

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The Metamorphoses of Caliban

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Queer territories in the Americas: Reinaldo Arenas’ prose

Queer territories in the Americas: Reinaldo Arenas’ prose

Shakespeare, Montaigne, and the Idea of Savagery

Petrograd/Leningrad – Havana – Beijing 1917–1991; or, Marxist Theory and Socialist Practice

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