Exploring Caliban in Shakespeare’s the tempest in the context of post-colonialist theory

The character, Caliban, from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, is one of the most widely discussed individual characters in Shakespeare’s entire canon, especially in relation to issues of the way that Europeans represent (or mis-represent) non-white peoples, historically, in literature and in culture generally. Shakespeare wrote during the height of the English Renaissance, which as Fortier states is the first century which post-colonial critiques generally begin as a point of discussion regarding “the effects of the western imperialism that has dominated the world since the sixteenth century and that has been unraveling since the end of the Second World War.” (Fortier: 192) Ideas of the inferiority and savagery of African peoples would become entrenched in European culture, with the economic system of slavery and the practices of colonial control two of the key ways that Europeans joined racist ideas to economic and cultural domination.
Fortier writes, “Like feminism, post-colonialism aims to give voice to an oppressed group by understanding and critiquing the structures of oppression and articulating and encouraging liberation and revolution.”

[...] The plot to capture the island and make Stephano a new King shows us how in Shakespeare’s version of the Tempest, no matter how Caliban claims to have been tricked out of ownership, he is willing to turn his kingdom over to the drunken sailors. “I’ll show thee every fertile inch th’island, /And I will kiss they foot. I prithee, be my god.” (Act scene l. 145-146) This reveals his lack of judgment and his natural position of servitude; one that would have confirmed European ideas of the inferior nature of non-white people. [...]

[...] (Callaghan: 21) As she argues, Caliban has become linked in the minds of many playwrights in the post-colonial era as a key symbol of the struggle against colonialism itself. (Callaghan: 21) She quotes a playwright, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, who maintains that Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be ‘read’ as script for resistance to colonialism: know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality . [W]hat is our history, what is our culture, if not the history and culture of Caliban?"(Retamar in Callaghan: 21) Thus, as Fortier suggests in his text on theory and its application to theatrical productions, the post-colonial can mean the transformation of a text which may have meant one thing at one time, into a text which means something totally different in our time. [...]

[...] Part of post-colonial theory is the idea that identities are not fixed, but rather they are hybrid in nature. (Forier: 194-195) This refers to entanglement of cultural identities in a migratory and diasporic world.” (Fortier: 194) This can mean someone living in Toronto of mixed-race heritage, trying to figure out what their identity is, or the impact of being born in one country in the Caribbean and ending up living a cosmopolitan lifestyle in New York City. Therefore, a post-colonial viewpoint considers that “There are many and often conflicting strands that make up the post-colonial situation and identity.” (Fortier: 194) People who live in post-colonial nations, a theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak maintains, may have many different identities and points of view, being part of a number of different communities at the same time. [...]