Reinaldo Arenas, Caliban, and Postcolonial Discourse By Enrique ...

A. T. Vaughan states, “A persistent assumption of modern literary history is that English colonization of America profoundly influenced Shakespeare’s creation of The Tempest, especially his characterization of the ‘savage and deformed slave’ Caliban” (Vaughan, “Shakespeare’s Indian” 137). However, this idea has come under much scrutiny, particularly because it is difficult to speculate about what Shakespeare may have been thinking at the time he wrote his last play. Regardless, contemporary literary analytic trends point to the use of Caliban as representative of colonized peoples no matter the country or the time period.

This play symbolizes colonial discourse because of the manner in which the colonizer manipulates information regarding the colonized. It transgresses beyond what is considered truth by creating images that reflect the opposite of how the colonizer sees himselve. Meredith Anne Skura theorizes that it reflects English colonialism: its attitudes, beliefs, and practices. She states, “Europeans arrive in the New World and assume they can appropriate what properly belongs to the New World Other, who is then ‘erased’” (48). This statement provides a partial response to Edward Said’s questions: “[W]as imperialism principally economic, how far did it extend, what were its causes, was it systematic, when (or whether) did it end?” (Culture and Imperialism 5). The idea presented by Skura is reflected in parallel arguments by Ania Loomba, Frantz Fanon, Bill Ashcroft, and Rey Chow, who argue that the colonizer justifies his control and domination over the native subject by seeing his inferiority and acknowledging his existence, which perpetuates his continued presence even after decolonization.

These attitudes are universal and prevalent among Europeans who ignored the needs or the existence of the native. The Tempest is a form of colonial discourse because of its narcissistic ideal; the European’s ethnocentric notion did not take into account the