Proceedings of the 10th International Academic Conference on Humanities and Social Sciences
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Exiled Beasts and Monsters: An Examination of Caliban, Identity, and Resistance Culture in Aimé Césaire’s a Tempest
Linda N. Masi
ABSTRACT:
“Exiled Beasts and Monsters: An Examination of Caliban, Identity, and Resistance Culture in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest” offers a postcolonial reading of Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest. Whereas Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism depicts resistance as a reaction to imperialism, as an alternative way of conceiving human history, and as a move towards human community and human liberation, this paper explores the ways Aimé Césaire courts activism, stirs political discourse, and interrogates the colonial representation of Indigenous people in his play. The paper shows how Caliban gains a new idea of his identity that negates the image Prospero imposes upon him and how this realization functions as resistance, as well as its impact on Prospero. Hence, the paper not only interrogates the interior gaze of the colonizer as an authority from the Center and as a “white settler” but also claims that Caliban’s resistance deconstructs the master-servant relationship he shares with Prospero and situates the colonizer in a vulnerable position where he needs the colonized in order to assert his position of authority and dominance over the colonized. This posits that the play attempts to circumvent established colonial authority. The paper goes on to examine texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in comparison with Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest. I ultimately argue that Césaire’s A Tempest effectively undermines the colonial trope where the colonized usually ends up being dominated by the colonizer and portrays the colonized as empowered at its conclusion, thereby challenging the dominant colonialist ideology through its representation of Caliban and colonization.
keywords: Sub-culture, Postcolonialism, Identity, Resistance, Language