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May Joseph Sycorax Mythology Spirit of Exchange and the Cannibalistic State Sorceress, queen, slave, mother, witch, and revolutionary—Sycorax ruptures the narrative of visual modernity with her vociferous howls of dissent in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A mythic representation mother earth, virgin nature, or the maternal spirit, Sycorax embodies a radical revisioning of gendered power within nationalist struggles . Until recently a neglected figure in Shakespeare’s final play, Sycorax offers a provocative critique of the erasure of women as political participants in the modern state. She draws our attention to the history of colonial conquest and national liberation , which have consigned women to the shadows of modern nation formation. Recent feminist reflections on Sycorax respond to earlier colonial and postcolonial adaptations of The Tempest that neglect her and focus solely on Ariel, Caliban, and Prospero. As Roberto Fernández Retamar points out in his essay Caliban (1971), the metaphorical power of Caliban/Cannibal—evidenced by Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Montaigne ’s On Cannibals (1580), and Shakespeare’s The Tempest—has generated an elaborate reworking of North-South readings of the emerging state in relation to colonial and post-independence narratives of state power.1 Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodo’s Ariel (1900), French Jean Guéhenno’s Caliban Speaks (1926), O. Mannoni’s Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (1950), Martinican Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Barbadian George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960), Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiongo’s “Africa and Cultural Decolonization (1971), John Pepper Clark’s The Example of Shakespeare (1970), David Wallace’s Do You Love Me Master? (1977), and Martinican Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest (1969) offer the most interesting treatments of Caliban. The omission of Sycorax in these texts reveals the gendered nature of the struggle for postcolonial statehood . As the unspoken source of Caliban’s servitude, Sycorax is read through Prospero ’s own history of possessing and being possessed. She is the first term of the appropriation of property, the last term of desire as alchemy. Sycorax impinges upon the terrain of male protagonists of nation-state formation as a disruptive presence, more often heard than seen. Unlike Prospero’s daughter Miranda , whom Coco Fusco reminds us is the other significant female character in The Tempest, Sycorax embodies gendered indigenousness.2 She is invoked as the primordial occupant of Argier, the precolonial pristine territory outside Europe’s cartographic imagination. In its evocative historic import, her emergence as aural black subjectivity outside Europe’s ocularity is already posed as an interlocking system of signs: she is heard, not seen, and therefore occupies a place outside the visuality of Europe’s language of reason. Yet it is the coerced visual silence of her incarcerated “irrational” body on which Prospero’s own tenuous reason hinges. Her cacophonous barbarism confirms Prospero’s wordy civility. Her sonic silence is deafening indeed, as her threatening “bestiality,” ability to reproduce, magical powers, and rights to the land by virtue of her nativeness all mark the limits of European male anxiety, and must therefore be hidden, repressed. But, as Sycorax suggests, you can incarcerate the body of the historically disempowered subject, but its aurality cannot be erased. As a citizen of New World modernity, Sycorax, the racialized, colonized, gendered subject, returns to the scene of her repression. This time her tale is reversed, as she travels to the former empire turned island nation, Britain—and by extension the West —and interrupts notions of universalist humanism by staging her own modern sorcery : the claim to democratic citizenship. The scream of Sycorax exposes the ideological ambivalence of the democratizing discourses of the West and challenges the limits of Prospero’s science of privileged white citizenship in Britain. The aurality of Sycorax is a powerful diasporic link between African, European, Caribbean, and New World subject formations. Her voice evokes the obscured historic terrains through which subaltern struggles must materialize. She is the resounding force behind the nascent state as she elaborates the selective narration of possessor and possessed, cannibal and cannibalized. Sycorax disarticulates Empire, Englishness , and masculinity while simultaneously shaping the discourse of modernity, desire , and indigenous rights in the diabolical encounter of Europe with its fantasies of elsewhere. As a key to unraveling the psychic boundaries of power, gender, and nationalist sentiment, Sycorax is simultaneously native woman and modern subject of the new nation. Her screams unleash the unspoken economies of exchange. She forces on the pragmatism of emerging capitalist world systems a nervousness...

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