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...using for anticolonial purposes. Goldberg's founding assumptions might be described as conservatively radical, grounded as they are in the New Historicist and cultural materialist accounts of the play that see it as a colonialist document intricately related to the development of English imperialism in the Americas. He is therefore briefly dismissive of the more recent emphases on the Mediterranean and Old World contexts of the play, which are in any case less relevant to the Caribbean appropriations that provide his main subject matter.
The book's center of gravity is very much the Caribbean. Goldberg immerses himself in the writings of some of its leading figures--Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Aime Cesaire, Sylvia Wynter, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Kamau Brathwaite, and Michelle Cliff--and is primarily concerned with the possibilities their work might offer toward a new social future: he notes in the preface that the inspiring force behind the book lay with the "living possibilities" inherent "in these diaporic texts" (xi). Goldberg offers a particularly compelling account of Wynter's work: indeed, the whole book is in a sense a dialogue with and sympathetic extension of Wynter's ideas. The particular issue which Goldberg wants to highlight in his rereading of the revisionary texts by Caribbean writers is that of sexuality. Caliban remains the central figure of analysis, but Sycorax and Miranda are also constant reference points, whereas other characters, even Prospero, feature hardly at all.
One of the most attractive features of Tempest in the Caribbean is therefore its full engagement with the region's writers. Caribbean readings and reinscriptions of The Tempest have increasingly been granted some small recognition by Shakespearean scholarship (as in Jonathan Bate's The Genius of Shakespeare [1997]), but have hardly even taken center stage, while analysts of Caribbean writing have paid little attention to the light such texts might actually throw on Shakespeare's play. Goldberg offers Lamming and Wynter and Cliff the compliment of reading their texts with the care and attention he uses in reading Shakespeare. His respect always illuminates the material he discusses.
When Tempest in the Caribbean returns to Europe, it engages with Hegel, Locke, and Kant more directly than with Shakespeare. Nevertheless, The Tempest and its characters are present on almost every page and, since the play's...
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