SOURCE: Pallister, Janis L. “Une tempête.” In Aimé Césaire, pp. 87-97. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

In the following essay, Pallister provides a critical overview of A Tempest.

Obviously modeled after, and even a subversion of, Shakespeare's The Tempest, Césaire's Une tempête (1969), an “adaptation for Negro theater,” seeks to reorient the colonized Caliban, to free him from the shackles of precivilization Prospero has imposed on him. Island imagery once again prevails, and Prospero and Caliban effectively point up the master-slave dynamic.

Seemingly unknown to most commentators on Césaire's play, Ernest Renan, who in his rationalistic and progressivist Avenir de la science (1890) proposes that the man of the people is mindless and must be “cultivated,” had illustrated his ideas in the 1878 play Caliban. At the beginning of Renan's play Caliban is still revolting against a paternalistic and exploitative Prospero, who had usurped Caliban's island and...