Red, White, and Black: Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World

Written in an era in which both African and New World expansion were in the cultural and political conversation, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is the product of a specific historical moment in which the English were in the midst of a massive epistemological shift that forced them to address not only their place in the world but also how that world was structured. In the 1950s, scholars in the field of postcolonial theory began to reread William Shakespeare’s inclusion of strange new lands inhabited by the indigenous spirit Ariel and the monstrous Caliban as an indictment of the English’s colonizing violence.¹ This postcolonial scholarship on The Tempest became so prevalent that Duke Pesta claims, “Once the initial argument evolved that The Tempest was primarily and consciously a play about colonialism, the premise was accepted with little or no reservation.”²

Postcolonial readings of The Tempest, however, are largely myopic in their analyses of the play. For the most part, these scholars read the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as the locus of the struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. Postcolonial readings of The Tempest focus so strongly on the relationship between Prospero and Caliban that Ariel, although also a slave to Prospero, is often neglected.³ Arguments against the Americanization of The Tempest,⁴ and thus the application of the postcolonial lens, often fail to incorporate the ways in which the play not only addresses the discovery of the New World but also simultaneously signals its most infamous and violent institution, chattel slavery.⁵ I wish to offer an intervention that addresses how The Tempest engages not only with postcolonial theory broadly construed but also, specifically, with paradigmatic structures of race that can exist only in the unique historical moment of Europe’s “discovery” of the Americas. This reading of the play uses Afro-pessimism to address postcolonial theory’s blind spots by repositioning the colonizer/subaltern relationship away from Prospero and Caliban and onto Prospero and Ariel. With this new alignment, we can begin to see how Shakespeare’s The Tempest both engages with notions of human identity and meditates on the construction of human ontology. By using Afro-pessimist theories of ontological absence and libidinal economy to unpack the power dynamics of the play, I will argue that Shakespeare’s Caliban represents not the colonized subaltern but the black ontological Slave.

Afro-pessimism is a field of black critical theory that counters typical academic engagements that privilege the analysis of political economy. Political economy in its broadest sense is the whole of the network of interactions that govern trade and production and their relations to law, customs, and government; in other words, all of the exchanges that exist within a society. The discourse of political economy, however, often deploys an argumentative slippage that reads all types of suffering and oppression as analogous across racial, political, ethnic, and class lines—or, as Frank Wilderson calls it, “The Ruse of Analogy.”⁶ Afro-pessimism operates at a higher domain of abstraction to articulate what exists within the world, as well as the psychic network of desire, anxiety, and revulsion that informs and scaffolds the psyche’s construction of value in that world. To accomplish this, Afro-pessimism looks beyond political economy and analyzes libidinal economy, which Jared Sexton defines as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious . . . [it is] the whole structure of psychic and emotional life . . . [that is] a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation.”⁷

In other words, while political economy describes the exchanges that occur within the world, libidinal economy is the network of psychic impulses that makes the things exchanged repulsive or desirable: Political economy is the “what” of civil society, while libidinal economy is the “why” and the “how.” For Afro-pessimists, human libidinal economy gains coherence through its inability to comprehend...