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trumpets race is the text that the African American writer is going to twist and turn every which way but loose. Finally, if Terence Hawkes is to be believed, such a view of literary call and response or challenge and reciprocation may well be applicable to the study of a Shakespearean play, a text composed, as music is, for performance: “[L]anguage [like Shakespeare’s] never occurs in the abstract. It always represents an intervention into a continuing dialogue, and its meanings constitute and are constituted by a response to that context of utterance” (Hawkes 1986:79). In other words, Shakespeare himself, in his tapestry of folk, literary, and dramatic snippets that constitute The Tempest, may be signifying on the texts of Montaigne, accounts of recent exploratory ventures in the New World, and emerging views of Native and African “others.”

What cues are contained in The Tempest that might have inspired— or goaded—Gloria Naylor and other African American writers to “signify” on Shakespeare? An Africanist reading of The Tempest is not as far-fetched as it might appear, even after centuries of excluding racial considerations from discussion of Shakespearean theater. It is, first of all, noteworthy that in 1611, within ten years of the sale of the first slave in South Carolina (1619), Shakespeare provides us with one of literature’s first depictions of a Native laboring and suffering on an island plantation. The Tempest also deals systematically with the full agenda of colonial and racist doctrines and objectives. Early modern rivalries between Europe and Africa are recorded in the racial slurs of Sebastian and Antonio against Tunis, and Caliban as African is routinely demonized and excoriated. Prospero reminds Caliban repeatedly that he is a “poisonous slave, got by the devil himself/Upon thy wicked dam’’ (1.2.323–24). Native lands are expropriated, as Caliban emphatically declares: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,/ Which thou tak’st from me” (1.2.334–35). Natives are also enslaved, either as indentured servants or chattel slaves. Ariel is an indentured servant, and continually pesters Prospero about his promised emancipation: “Remember I have done thee worthy service,/…/… Thou did promise/To bate me a full year” (1.2.248, 250–51). Caliban is the chattel slave, imprisoned and exploited by the European intruder. As Prospero reminds Caliban: “Therefore wast thou/Deservedly confined into this rock/Who hadst deserved more than a prison” (1.2.348–51). Anxiety about miscegenation resonates in the marriage of the African king, Tunis, to Alonso’s daughter Claribel and in Caliban’s presumed attack on Miranda which, according to Prospero, initiated the hostilities between them:

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