ABSTRACT
A generation of postcolonial writers involved in and inspired by struggles for national liberation, including Edward Brathwaite, Aimé Césaire, George Lamming, and Derek Walcott, appropriated Shakespeare’s work, famously remaking it into an allegory of empire and reclaiming Caliban and Ariel as anti-colonial freedom fighters against Prospero the colonizer. With the global social movements of the 1960s, creative rewrites, dramatic performances, and critical analyses from across the Anglophone world associated the play with decolonization, revolutionary upheaval, transition, and the birth of a capitalist system now seemingly facing terminal decline. The centuries-old culture war around the play took a sharp turn, with the integrative Tempest now on the defensive against a proliferation of both ‘shock the bourgeoisie’ disintegrative variations and newly ascendant liberatory renditions vocalizing the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist radicalism of the age. An unprecedented wave of innovative appropriations permanently transformed the play, this time into a global symbol of the ‘tempest of dissent.’
