Original scientific paper
Anti-colonial Tempest: Theory and Practice of Postmodemist Shakespearean Reinscriptions
Janja Ciglar-Žanić
Abstract
The paper purports to examine dominant semiotic and ideological propositions underlying recent re-readings/re-writings of Shakespeare's "The Tempest". A range of these new reinscriptions, both critical and creative, have in the past two decades made Shakespeare's text into a paradigmatic cultural site of struggle over the definitions of power and authority, linking the play unequivocally
to the issues of colonization, subordination and hegemony. The radical novelty of these interpretations of The Tempest and their potential to stir controversy over Crucial contemporary cultural issues make them, in the author's view, particularly deserving of attention. By reference to the potentially subversive elements in the structure of the play itself, by reference to the history of the play's various readings, as well as by reference to the relevant epistemological and socio-political concerns of contemporary theories of culture, the author tries to demonstrate how these factors - in their unique contemporary fitment - lend the recent reinscriptions of Shakespeare's late romance their unmistakable anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic thrust. In conclusion, the author attempts to point to the wíder cultural implications of the interpretive
practices under discussion, emphasizing their import on the understanding of the historicity of our own reinscriptions of the past as well as on our inscriptions of the present.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
120282
URI
Publication date:
15.9.1997.
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