ABSTRACT

Raquel Carrio and Flora Lauten’s text replaces the strict colonizer/colonized power structure of William Shakespeare’s Prospero and Caliban with a new dynamic in which European literary characters and African goddesses create their own new worlds on a Latin American island. Otra Tempestad de-centers the Prospero/Caliban dichotomy that dominates postcolonial studies of The Tempest by appropriating characters and plotlines from several other Shakespeare plays. In one of Prpspero’s first scenes exploring the island, he flourishes a handheld mirror, dangling it before Ariel and Caliban. Otra Tempestad depicts neither a gendered relationship in which Caliban has power over Miranda, nor a colonial relationship in which Miranda has power over Caliban. The love for each other transforms and inverts Miranda’s storylines from Shakespeare’s Tempest. Carrio and Lauten build upon the image of the island that already dominates Shakespeare’s Tempest to challenge not only the practice of colonization, but the drive behind it.