• Red, White, and BlackShakespeare’s The Tempest and the Structuring of Racial Antagonisms in Early Modern England and the New World
• Matthieu Chapman

Written in an era in which both African and New World expansion were in the cultural and political conversation, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is the product of a specific historical moment in which the English were in the midst of a massive epistemological shift that forced them to address not only their place in the world but also how that world was structured. In the 1950s, scholars in the field of postcolonial theory began to reread William Shakespeare’s inclusion of strange new lands inhabited by the indigenous spirit Ariel and the monstrous Caliban as an indictment of the English’s colonizing violence.¹ This postcolonial scholarship on The Tempest became so prevalent that Duke Pesta claims, “Once the initial argument evolved that The Tempest was primarily and consciously a play about colonialism, the premise was accepted with little or no reservation.”²

Postcolonial readings of The Tempest, however, are largely myopic in their analyses of the play. For the most part, these scholars read the relationship between Prospero and Caliban as the locus of the struggle between the colonizer and the colonized. Postcolonial readings of The Tempest focus so strongly on the relationship between Prospero and Caliban that Ariel, although also a slave to Prospero, is often neglected.³ Arguments against the Americanization of The Tempest,⁴ and thus the application of the postcolonial lens, often fail to incorporate the ways in which the play not only addresses the discovery of the New World but also simultaneously signals its most infamous and violent institution, [End Page 7] chattel slavery.⁵ I wish to offer an intervention that addresses how The Tempest engages not only with postcolonial theory broadly construed but also, specifically, with paradigmatic structures of race that can exist only in the unique historical moment of Europe’s “discovery” of the Americas. This reading of the play uses Afro-pessimism to address postcolonial theory’s blind spots by repositioning the colonizer/subaltern relationship away from Prospero and Caliban and onto Prospero and Ariel. With this new alignment, we can begin to see how Shakespeare’s The Tempest both engages with notions of human identity and meditates on the construction of human ontology. By using Afro-pessimist theories of ontological absence and libidinal economy to unpack the power dynamics of the play, I will argue that Shakespeare’s Caliban represents not the colonized subaltern but the black ontological Slave.

Afro-pessimism is a field of black critical theory that counters typical academic engagements that privilege the analysis of political economy. Political economy in its broadest sense is the whole of the network of interactions that govern trade and production and their relations to law, customs, and government; in other words, all of the exchanges that exist within a society. The discourse of political economy, however, often deploys an argumentative slippage that reads all types of suffering and oppression as analogous across racial, political, ethnic, and class lines—or, as Frank Wilderson calls it, “The Ruse of Analogy.”⁶ Afro-pessimism operates at a higher domain of abstraction to articulate what exists within the world, as well as the psychic network of desire, anxiety, and revulsion that informs and scaffolds the psyche’s construction of value in that world. To accomplish this, Afro-pessimism looks beyond political economy and analyzes libidinal economy, which Jared Sexton defines as “the economy, or distribution and arrangement, of desire and identification (their condensation and displacement), and the complex relationship between sexuality and the unconscious . . . [it is] the whole structure of psychic and emotional life . . . [that is] a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation.”⁷

In other words, while political economy describes the exchanges that occur within the world, libidinal economy is the network of psychic impulses that makes the things exchanged repulsive or desirable: Political economy is the “what” of civil society, while libidinal economy is the “why” and the “how.” For Afro-pessimists, human libidinal economy gains coherence through its inability to comprehend...

• 红色，白色和黑色莎士比亚的《暴风雨》和近代英格兰和新世界的种族对抗结构
• 马修·查普曼（Matthieu Chapman）

威廉·莎士比亚（William Shakespeare）的《暴风雨》是在非洲和新世界都在文化和政治对话中展开的时代写的，它是特定历史时刻的产物，在这个历史时刻，英语正处于大规模的认识论转变之中，迫使他们去解决。不仅是他们在世界上的位置，而且是世界的结构。在1950年代，后殖民理论领域的学者开始重新阅读威廉·莎士比亚（William Shakespeare）所包含的由土著精神阿里埃勒（Ariel）和可怕的卡利班（Caliban）居住的陌生新土地，作为对英国殖民暴力行为的起诉。¹这项关于《暴风雨》的后殖民奖学金变得如此普遍，以至于佩斯塔公爵声称：“一旦最初的论点演变为《暴风雨》主要是有意识地关于殖民主义的戏剧，前提是毫无保留地接受了这一前提。” ^2个

然而，对《暴风雨》的后殖民解读在很大程度上对他们的戏剧分析是近视的。在大多数情况下，这些学者将普洛斯彼罗与卡利班之间的关系视为殖民者与被殖民者之间斗争的焦点。后殖民时期对《暴风雨》的阅读如此强烈地关注了普洛斯彼罗与卡利班之间的关系，以致爱丽儿虽然也是普洛斯彼罗的奴隶，却常常被忽视。^3个针对的美国化参数暴风雨，⁴因而殖民镜头的应用，往往不能纳入其中播放，不仅解决了新大陆的发现的方式，但也同时标志着其最臭名昭著的暴力机构，[结束第7页]动产奴隶制。⁵我希望提供一种干预措施，以解决《暴风雨》不仅与广泛解释的后殖民理论有关的问题，而且特别涉及只有在欧洲“发现”美洲的独特历史时刻才能存在的种族范式结构。该剧本的阅读使用非洲悲观主义，通过将殖民者/后属关系从Prospero和Caliban移到Prospero和Ariel，从而解决了后殖民理论的盲点。通过这种新的结合，我们可以开始了解莎士比亚的《暴风雨》两者都涉及人类身份的概念，并沉思人类本体的构建。通过使用黑人悲观论者的本体论缺失和自由经济理论来解开剧本的动力，我将认为莎士比亚的《卡利班》不代表被殖民的次要人物，而是代表黑色的本体论奴隶。

非洲悲观主义是黑人批判理论的一个领域，它与对政治经济学进行分析的典型学术活动背道而驰。从最广泛的意义上讲，政治经济学是控制贸易和生产及其与法律，习俗和政府关系的相互作用的整个网络。换句话说，一个社会内存在的所有交流。然而，政治经济学的话语经常会引起争论性的失误，将所有类型的苦难和压迫解读为种族，政治，种族和阶级界限之间的相似之处，或者如弗兰克·威尔逊森（Frank Wilderson）所称的“类比的诡计”。⁶非洲悲观主义者在更高的抽象领域进行操作，以阐明世界上存在的事物，以及欲望，焦虑和厌恶的心理网络，这些信息网络并支撑着心理在该世界的价值建构。为了实现这一目标，非洲悲观主义者超越了政治经济学，分析了性欲经济学，贾里德·塞克斯顿（Jared Sexton）将其定义为“欲望和认同（他们的凝结与流离失所）的经济或分布与安排，以及性与无意识之间的复杂关系”。 。。。这是心理和情感生活的整体结构。。。[即]精力，忧虑，注意点，焦虑，愉悦，食欲，反感和恐惧症的消散，能够同时具有很大的活动能力和顽强的固执力。” ⁷

换句话说，虽然政治经济学描述了世界范围内发生的交流，但性欲经济是使事物间相互排斥或令人渴望的心理冲动网络：政治经济学是公民社会的“东西”，而性欲经济是“公民社会的“东西”。为什么”和“如何”。对于非洲悲观主义者来说，人类的性欲经济由于无法理解而获得了连贯性。