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I have used thee

Filth as thou art with human care, and lodged thee

In mine own cell, till thou didst seek to violate

The honour of my child.

(1.2.348–51)

Illicit African gods such as Setebos are worshiped by Caliban, and African religions are associated, through Sycorax, with demonism, witchcraft, and the feminine. European patriarchy is then celebrated as the necessary moral development beyond matriarchy in Prospero’s “beneficent” acculturation of the slave. As Prospero claims,

When thou didst not, savage,

Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like

A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes

With words that made them known.

(1.2.358–61)

The comic subplot involving Stephano, Trinculo, and Caliban can be read as a farcical, abortive slave insurrection; alternatively, Caliban can be seen as representative of the Native population, subdued and demoralized by the Western drug, alcohol. He is also repeatedly bargained for by both Antonio and Stephano as a New World exotic with financial potential back in England (see The Tempest 2.2.26 ff.).

In short, The Tempest articulates a full roster of early modern racial stereotypes as it reaffirms a system of colonial dominion designed to control the Native populations onto which those stereotypes are projected. There is, in other words, rich Africanist “new corn” to be extracted from “old” European, colonial “fields” in The Tempest via Gates’s clever elucidation of literary signifying. In a recent anthology of critical essays on Naylor’s novels, Gates refers to Peter Erickson’s argument that “Naylor employs Shakespeare to thematize the split between white male and Black female literary traditions, as well as between ‘white’ high culture and ‘Black’ everyday experience’’ (1993: xii). Valerie Traub also presents the challenge facing Black women writers as “doubly problematic: how to negotiate a relationship to an Anglo-European language and tradition that doubly defines them as absence and lack—as black and as women” (1993:151). Thus, Naylor’s task as female revisionist of Shakespeare’s play has a particular urgency.

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