Tempest in the Caribbean (review)

Tempest in the Caribbean examines the vital connections between Shakespeare's play and the many Caribbean rewritings it has generated. This generativity, Jonathan Goldberg argues, has centrally to do with the play's presentation of Caliban as a monster and failed rapist who desires to people the island with his progeny. Such desire foregrounds issues of race, gender, and sexuality that mark the play both as a "colonial document" and a site for anticolonialist responses. In his three-part analysis, Goldberg "take[s] up several moments of textual trouble . . . that . . . fracture along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality" (4) in order to show how conditions of exclusion in early modern discourses become conditions of possibility in instances of Caribbean fiction and theorizing. In attending to sexuality in its politically explosive connection to race and its complication of gender, Goldberg not only rethinks editorial decisions about The Tempest and their interpretive consequences but also reveals the limitations of masculinist anticolonialist approaches (and certain feminist ones, too) that, in adopting oppositional strategies, remain trapped within the heteronormative assumptions of colonialist discourses. The result is an exciting intellectual venture that both contributes to the postcolonial scholarship on Shakespeare and promotes a dialogue between early modern and Caribbean studies.

Part I, "A Different Kind of Creature," focuses on writers and intellectuals who have seized upon the name Caliban, with its associations of cannibalism and the Caribs, as a figuration for the hybrid and plural identity of Caribbean people, what José Martí calls "'our mestizo America'" (6). While noting the masculinist and homophobic biases in some writers, notably Roberto Fernández Retamar, Goldberg finds in George Lamming a more nuanced logic, one that, by "embracing difference," advances the recovery of "the whole man" (30), the project Fanon calls for in The Wretched of the Earth (1959). This analysis establishes early on the power of fiction in theorizing the possibilities for new social actors in the postcolonial Caribbean.

The project of recovery extends beyond the confines of "man" in Part II, "Caliban's 'Woman.'" Here, Goldberg's analysis focuses on the significance of sodomy as both a "proto-racial marker" (48) and a means of demonizing Sycorax and Caliban in The Tempest, as well as on the ground from which new cultural identities and non-normative—cross-racial, same-sex—sexualities emerge in the fiction of some Caribbean writers. Thus in The Hills of Hebron (1984), Sylvia Wynter projects "'a new contestatory image of the human,'" rejecting "the unfulfilled promise of humanism" in the Western tradition (66); and in Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987), Michelle Cliff imagines non-normative sexualities and social relationships to be enabling in the social reproduction of racial knowledge and self-knowledge. Their visions frame subsequent readings of texts, from Edward Kamau Brathwaite's defiant masculinism to Hilton Als's "auntie man" (male homosexuality understood on a cross-gender model), or H. Nigel Thomas's gay male perspective; or the erotics of Aimé Césaire's Une tempête (1969), which revolves around the potent bisexual trickster-god Eshu and extends to a desire for nature's "capacity for metamorphosis and transformation" as a source of colonial resistance (99).

The reclamation of the human undertaken by Caribbean writers prompts a critique of the racist logic operative in Englightenment ideas of the human in Locke, Kant, and Hegel and its colonialist and neocolonialist legacy. In Part III, "Miranda's Meanings," Goldberg shows that such racist logic is already present in Miranda's judgment of Caliban as ineducable (hence inhuman) slave, a judgment that participates in the period's discourses on race and humanist education. In thinking beyond this racist legacy, Goldberg is, not surprisingly, skeptical of Paul Gilroy's call in Against Race (2000) for "a new humanism to replace race thinking" (141). Returning to the queering perspectives of Caribbean fiction, Goldberg persuades us that, against racism, race still harbors the resources for "articulating futures for the Caribbean worth imagining" (144...