A partir de una mirada construida desde la filosofía política nuestroamericana y la epistemología crítica nos preguntamos sobre las potencias y los sesgos de la metáfora de Caliban para pensar el devenir político y emancipatorio en Latinoamérica. Recuperamos la postulación de Fernández Retamar sobre la “mirada calibanesca” como lugar de enunciación diferencial y emancipatorio constituido desde el “maldecir”. Damos cuenta de los personajes conceptuales que se despliegan en este teatro filosófico y del devenir del esclavo a partir de su (...) maldecir en la lengua del opresor, mostrando las tramas entre raza y clase. Visibilizamos el sesgo epistemológico que posee la mirada calibanesca en torno a las mujeres, especialmente la de Sycorax, su madre asesinada por Próspero. Proponemos como contrapunto al devenir de Caliban un devenir mujer que supone la interseccionalidad de raza, clase, género y territorio. Lo hacemos desde los aportes críticos de Silvia Federici y Rita Segato a fin de renovar la mirada dialéctica Próspero-Caliban y denunciar la invisibilización y violencia sistemática sobre las mujeres, asumidas como territorios de disputa y venganza. (shrink)

Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House, situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use (...) Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman. (shrink)

One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time among mirrors, listening to explanations from the (...) overseers, attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological inscriptions of a given discourse—its situation on what Amiri Baraka calls the “real side” of economic exchange and world exploitative power—rationalists are concerned to study discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker’s passion is palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the invisible man’s tormentor, to “Get hot, boy! Get hot!” Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and intelligently unflappable in their analyses.This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual approaches to a common subject—namely, notions of duality. My claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse, devoted to, say, “the Other” and conceived in dualistic terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other’s sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to discover the dynamics of “othering” engaged in by a self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field. Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. (shrink)

In October and November, 1948, an exchange on democracy between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus appeared in Jean Daniel's monthly Caliban. At first glance these articles confirm the prevailing sense that the 1952 split was inevitable. But reading the break back into the relationship presents it with a kind of necessity, corresponding to the law of "analysis after the event" described by Doris Lessing. Inasmuch as it resulted in a break, we are tempted to focus from the start on (...) "the laws of dissolution" of the relationship. As in a marriage that ends in divorce, afterwards we fixate on the logic of the breakup, as if the two were bound to fall out and that is all that matters. But the Sartre/Camus story was in reality too open-ended and complex for such a onesided reading of the story. The events of the year before these articles give us a very different sense of the relationship. (shrink)

"This study challenges those who argue for the liberating possibilities of the postmodern narrative, as Coleman reveals the pervasiveness of the Calibanic image and its tremendous influence."--BOOK JACKET.

Caliban Naufragé: Les Relations Nord‐Sud à la Fin du XXe Siècle. By Pierre Moussa (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1994) 329 pp. n.p.g.

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch is a landmark text in Marxist feminism, rethinking capitalism's development from and with the standpoint of women. In this paper, I trace Federici's theory and use of the Marxist concept of primitive accumulation through both Marx and Foucault, the two central interlocutors employed to analyze the perpetuity of violence following the explicit violence of capital's originary privatization. After understanding Federici's reading of the dialectical double helix of violence and compulsion via Marx, and the (...) relation of capital (as Reason and Order) to the body via Foucault, I position Adorno as a backdrop against which to view Federici’s thesis on primitive accumulation. Despite the innumerable theoretical similarities between Adorno and Federici, a close pairing shows what Caliban and the Witch misses in its final pages: a theory of mimesis—mimetic accumulation—that accounts for the dialectic of primitive accumulation's perpetuity. (shrink)

In his pioneering Caliban's Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy, Paget Henry points out that because of the region's colonial history, Caribbean philosophy is far more often found ‘embedded’ in other discourses, such as literature, than in explicit theorising. Following Henry's lead, I seek to find the philosophical ‘moral of the story’ of Voices Under the Window, the 1955 first novel of the late Jamaican writer John Hearne, which some critics regard as his best work. In a novel with significant autobiographical (...) elements, Hearne, a ‘high-brown’ or ‘red’ Jamaican, recounts the story of Mark Lattimer, likewise a ‘red man’ positioned at the upper edge of the ‘brown’ stratum of the white/brown/black Jamaican social pyramid. Lattimer moves from a race-denying attempt to ‘pass’ in World War II Britain to a Marxist social activism upon his later return to post-war Jamaica, but is killed in a black protest riot. His tragic fate raises important philosophical questions about race, colour, class, and personal and social transformation that remain very relevant today, especially considering the failure of 1970s Anglo-Caribbean radicalism to fulfil its revolutionary promise. (shrink)

Un discurso sobre las ciencias -- Hacia una epistemología de la ceguera : por qué razón las nuevas formas de "adecuación ceremonial" no regulan ni emancipan? -- Hacia una sociología de las ausencias y una sociología de las emergencias -- Más allá del pensamiento abismal : de las líneas globales a una ecología de saberes -- El fin de los descubrimientos imperiales -- Nuestra América : reinventando un paradigma subalterno de reconocimiento y redistribución -- Entre Próspero y Caliban : (...) colonialismo, poscolonialismo e inter-identidad -- De lo posmoderno a lo poscolonial y más allá de uno y de otro. (shrink)

Time is of increasing concern in Black studies, with scholars studying the ways in which standardized narratives of time are historically imposed on racialized populations. This essay reads Safiya Sinclair’s 2016 poetry collection Cannibal as offering a fugitive temporality that ruptures the stability of the racializing present. In Cannibal, Sinclair’s speaker does not attempt to release herself from the racializing condemnation of the past. Rather, she summons a fugitive social past in the present, antagonizing the homogeneity of the present by (...) exposing it to the repressed and relegated wounds that haunt the foundations of modernity’s racializing program. In Cannibal, this summoning is occasioned through a practice of faith. Following J. Kameron Carter and Fred Moten, among others, this essay studies the ways in which this fugitive poetic temporality of faith builds on contemporary developments in the critique of time, religion, and whiteness in Black studies. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form, characterized by its own specific history; (...) yet both groups are addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening of her bonds, liberation will be more painful. Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. (shrink)

This chapter traces the figure of the witch in key theoretical texts that link capitalism, patriarchy, and environmental degradation. In Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature, the witch poses a sexual threat to the emerging capitalist social order, and her image goes on to inform scientific method and the ontological de-animation of nature. In Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, persecution of the witch shores up the process of primitive accumulation in Europe and the Americas (whereby elites accrue capital, (...) land, and natural resources), as well as the obfuscation of feminized labor. While these works offer vital insights for feminist ecosocialist theory and practice, the essay argues for deeper reflection on the legacy of the “death” of nature. Drawing on the work of Isabelle Stengers and Marisol de la Cadena, the chapter considers the divergent natures at play in recent land conflicts in Peru, where “modern” norms of knowledge strain to accommodate animate earth-beings and rivers who are relatives. Attention to these divergent natures might complicate what appear to be shared agendas in environmental justice movements, but such complexity does not preclude the possibility of political alliance and solidarity. (shrink)

As critical research on religion, the study of colonialism and religion directs attention to religious creativity within the asymmetrical power relations of contact zones, intercultural relations, and diasporic circulations. Taking the imperial ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics as a point of departure, this article recalls how the drama of the colonizing Prospero and the colonized Caliban has been a template for analyzing religion under colonial conditions. Like Shakespeare’s enchanted isle, colonizing and colonized religion have been shaped by oceans, (...) with the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds emerging as crucial units of analysis. As a contribution to a symposium on critical approaches to the study of religion, this article indicates some of the important landmarks, sea changes, and analytical possibilities in the study of colonialism and religion. (shrink)

This article addresses the theme of primitive accumulation, a concept developed by Marx in Capital. For Marx, the concept of primitive accumulation deals with what he calls the prehistory of capital, the moment of transition from feudalism to capitalism, in which there is an original accumulation of capital necessary for the capitalist system to establish itself and generate its new cycles of accumulation. Marx presents several historical events of brutal violence that are part of primitive accumulation. However, the article presents (...) Silvia Federici's critique of Marx based on the work Caliban and the Witch: Marx does not take into account an essential factor for primitive accumulation and the birth of capitalism, that is, the witch hunt and the history of women who, despite their specific peculiarities, had global and essential consequences for the establishment of capitalism. Finally, the article reconstructs, based on Federici's work, how the witch hunt was a decisive factor for original accumulation. (shrink)

In her classic feminist text Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici provides an account of the punishment of witches in the seventeenth century as part of the burgeoning logic of capitalism and the disciplining of domains of women’s work. The Salem witch trials are an evocative example of these preoccupations in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. An enslaved woman, Tituba, stood at the center of the events. She was one of three women accused of enlisting young girls into witchcraft. The (...) other two were also women on the margins: one a beggar, and one a lady who had betrayed her respectable status by marrying an indentured servant. (shrink)

Los autores realizan un análisis comparativo entre The Tempest de Willian Shakespeare y La Tempestad de Augusto Boal, siguiendo la pauta de este último autor, quien ve en su obra no la adaptación de la del clásico dramaturgo inglés, sino la respuesta a aquella desde la perspectiva de Caliban y no de Próspero.

This paper looks at the thematic and rhetorical variations of a fundamental fear that frequently surfaces in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: the fear of illegitimate birth, which may also be understood as the fear of non-contractual sexuality. Sycorax is the prominent supernatural figure that the play deploys to depict unpredictable, indeterminate and horrible acts of creation unsanctioned by society. The paper shows how the fear of illegitimate birth not only shapes entire characters such as Sycorax and Caliban, but also infiltrates (...) the language and figures that prevail in Prospero’s orchestrations of the marriage plot, his betrothal masque and his deployment of Greco-Roman mythologies (Hymen, Venus and Cupid). This fear is also connected with the play’s other fears and desires evoked in Gonzalo’s anarchist utopia and in the play’s preoccupations with the issue of legitimate government. The focus on the fear of illegitimate birth and non-contractual sexuality connects the different plot elements and rhetorical devices used in the play in a novel way, providing a plausible explanation for Prospero’s burst at Caliban in the masque scene and foregrounding (and hence doing justice to) the long-neglected figure of Sycorax. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:For the Love of Nothing:Auden, Keats, and DeconstructionJo-Anne Cappeluti"Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not quite so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean, to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say"—W. H. AudenIDeconstruction by definition is (...) an exercise of the intellect's predilection to disprove and deny aesthetic experience. Deconstruction is in love with denying this "nothing," but is seemingly unaware of how attempting demystification entangles the intellect all the more with the imagination. And it is the imagination that creates aesthetic experience, the very entity critics deny even exists. This dynamic is especially true of deconstruction looking at the Romantic mode of poetry: the poetry of poets who serve as their own subject. Analyzing the internalized quests of these poets, deconstruction offers a drama of itself too much in love with demystifying aesthetic experience, attempting and always failing, intellectually, to reduce it to nothing.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are in love with this "nothing"; they present internalized quests filled with their acute awareness of the aesthetic—and highly indeterminate—nature of being human. At the core of this indeterminacy is the ongoing debate between imagination and intellect, the first interested in exploring what is there, in human consciousness, the second prone to demystifying it. Poets who write in this mode learn that such improvable yet actual aesthetic experience or "nothing" is germane to being human. Any attempt [End Page 345] to escape it intellectually will only lead back to the imagination that presents it.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are so familiar with the way in which this aesthetic nature of human existence involves the unresolved conflict between imagination and intellect that these poets present in their poetry a response to the criticism that denies it. John Keats and W. H. Auden are two poets who show this dynamic and who, not by coincidence, have a lot in common. Deconstruction, however, sees Auden and Keats—however separately—as poets who wake up at mid-career to the fallaciousness of the imagination and subsequently turn their talent to making nothing happen in their poetry: undermining its aesthetic nature. Keats's Endymion and Auden's "Caliban to the Audience" are frequently cited as prime examples of this demystification process. As I will argue, however, both of these poems deliberately dramatize the self-thwarting attempts of the intellect to dissect and dismiss what it claims is nothing.1Keats dramatizes this dynamic in Endymion, drawing attention to the way in which this "Brain-sick shepherd prince" claims—actually over-protests—to have loved "nothing" after his miraculous experience beneath the ocean with the strangely indeterminate creature, Glaucus (pp. 134, 206).2 Auden offers as well a detailed description of this dynamic in "Caliban to the Audience," the last section of The Sea and The Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In this poem, the strangely indeterminate, begged question of existence, Caliban, reveals in great detail his audience's futile attempt to demystify what upsets them.My argument concludes with a discussion of the way in which these poems dramatize deconstruction's unintentional witness to the "real Word" of the imagination (CP, p. 444).3As poets who write in the Romantic mode, exploring what is there in their consciousness, Keats and Auden find a great indeterminacy inherent in their human nature: an unresolved problem that they explore—rather than try to solve. Auden, in fact, links himself to Keats, finding in Keats's idea of the chameleon poet his (Auden's) central idea of the poet as actor for the imagination. Like Keats, Auden takes the imagination quite seriously and fuses Keats's sense of the imagination with Coleridge's: observing that poetry records the poet's experiences in which the (Primary) imagination is drawn to certain "sacred" beings and events. In "Making, Knowing and Judging," Auden declares that the "impression made upon the imagination by any sacred being is of... (shrink)

El año pasado, al terminar de leer Caliban y la bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria de Silvia Federici, lloré por todas las feminidades que han sido y que seguimos siendo quemadas en las hogueras de la historia, en las frases cotidianas y en las violencias de género. Esa noche no lograba conciliar el sueño, sentía un calor intenso en las piernas. No sabía qué me estaba pasando. A la mañana siguiente busqué entre mi archivo un texto de Suely (...) Rolnik que habla acerca de los saberes-del-cuerpo. Ella me ayudó a entender las razones de mi desvelo, mi cuerpa me estaba hablando, me estaba recordando que nuestras cuerpas se definen por la capacidad de afectar y ser afectados y que, al definirnos como cuerpas mujeriles, nos han subordinado. (shrink)

The fourth element of coming into the presence of God is the recognition that God is worthy of utter devotion and worship. As this chapter brings out, the fourth element of coming into the presence of God caps the three elements to which it is a fourth. Coming into the presence of God is distinguished from coming to the conviction that there is a God through ratiocinative or other means. And the range of religious affective responses to God and the (...) relationships to God that they define are contrasted with the affective responses of Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, the demons in the Letter of James, and Caliban in Browning’s poem, and the relationships those responses mark, as well as Bertrand Russell’s lack of a response, religious or antireligious, and lack of any kind of entered relationship to God, when he briefly thought that the ontological argument was sound, proved its conclusion, and hence that God exists. (shrink)

The relationship between Prospero and Miranda is fairly typical for Shakespeare’s way of portraying parental authority and filial obligation. A strong and authoritative father, an absent mother and a (potentially) rebellious daughter are character types reused in many of his plays. In The Tempest, authority, power and ownership, be it political or domestic, are important themes. In criticism, Prospero is frequently discussed through the prism of his attitude to his “subordinates”—Ariel, Caliban and Miranda—and the play’s narrative is interpreted in (...) the context of the theatre of power. Parental authority, a social construct, is a dynamic thing, and the Renaissance patterns discernible in Shakespeare’s plays are refashioned and changed in contemporary adaptations and appropriations of his plays. Informed by New Historicism and Cultural Materialism in relation to gender studies, this article seeks to examine the changing dynamics of the Prospero-Miranda relationship in three films—Derek Jarman’s (1979), Paul Mazursky’s (1982), and Julie Taymor’s (2010)—as well as Philip Osment’s 1988 play This Island’s Mine. Focusing on the issue of authority, power and ownership, the article aims at showing how stereotypical social and gender roles resonate with various political contexts of power. (shrink)

Written across the disciplines of art history, literature, philosophy, sociology, and theology, the ten essays comprising the collection all insist on multidimensional definitions of evil. Taking its title from a moment in Shakespeare's Tempest when Prospero acknowledges his responsibility for Caliban, this collection explores the necessarily ambivalent relationship between humanity and evil. To what extent are a given society's definitions of evil self-serving? Which figures are marginalized in the process of identifying evil? How is humanity itself implicated in the (...) production of evil? Is evil itself something fundamentally human? These questions, indicative of the kinds of issues raised in this collection, seem all the more pressing in light of recent world events. The ten essays were originally presented at the First Global Conference on Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness, held in March 2000 in Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. (shrink)

El texto esgrime argumentos a favor de la consideración de Roberto Fernández Retamar como un destacado pensador de la liberación en América Latina, sobre todo a través de su ensayística. Particularmente, destaca el aporte de su emblemático ensayo Calibán, en el que se realiza un agudo diagnóstico de la cultura latinoamericana y se esbozan las condiciones necesarias para su descolonización y liberación.

This paper examines Shakespeare’s dramatization of sovereign power through the concepts of Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Achille Mbembe’s necro politics, interrogating the sovereign’s ultimate power to decide who lives, who dies, and who remains outside the law. In As You Like It, exile renders the Duke Orlando and his companions, by stripping them of their legal sovereign right and reducing them to mere survival in the forest of Arden. Necro politics is illustrated in Romeo and Juliet through civic and (...) familial decrees, and the young lovers’ fate is sealed by sovereign authority, as their banishment equates to social death. In The Tempest, Prospero exercises colonial power by subjugating Ariel and Caliban, the island’s inhabitants. They get dispossessed by Prospero and reduced to servitude while fully denied legal recognition. By examining these dynamics, this paper explores how Shakespeare indicates the power of the sovereign as a “deadly dance” between protection and exclusion, dramatizing the political vulnerability of human life under exclusion, exile, and the regime of colonial domination. His plays thus fuel the notion of modern (late 20th century onward) biopolitical lives, portraying how sovereign practices its power through the creation of lives deemed expandable. (shrink)

The cannibal’s arrival in the most mainstream of genres, the Young Adult novel, speaks to the state of a publishing culture which celebrates diversity of all sorts but no genuine divergence from the party line, which has little interest in the lives of animals and even less to say about the reality of meat. This chapter focuses on the curious relationship between meat-eating, sex, and degrees of abstinence in Camille DeAngelis’s Bones and All, Chelsea G. Summers’s A Certain Hunger, and (...) Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies, but a major part of it will be devoted to reading, by way of contrast, Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban, which is easily the most romantic of the four, not least because its cannibal hero is wrongly accused. By bringing cannibal studies and vegan studies into conversation, I argue that when we follow what Emelia Quinn calls the ‘monstrous vegan’ into the American novel, the monster’s literary function undergoes a genuinely romantic transformation. Indeed, Mr Caliban’s refusal to eat meat is far more monstrous than any cannibal can claim. (shrink)