ABSTRACT
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Tempests evoked the war on terror, the financial meltdown, and the anti-capitalist movement in popular culture—especially science fiction but also music preoccupied with apocalypse and atavism—and in new critical histories of accumulation by dispossession. These Tempests were haunted by military occupation, incarceration, and torture, and bespoke the deep capitalist connections between resource extraction, the global war on terror, ecological rift, race and gender oppression, and indigenous dispossession. The century that witnessed the complete globalization of capitalism presented an equally globalized Tempest, and as the play traveled across the world, both literally and imaginatively, it frequently encountered local manifestations of dispossession and resistance. Looming environmental crisis focalized Gonzalo’s lines, ‘Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground...’ (I.i.65–8). As the unceasing drive to accumulate generated ever new ways to exploit available human and natural resources, even at the risk of dissolving ‘the great globe itself,’ the play’s ambivalent apprehension of mutability continued to fire contestation surrounding the transmission of culture, while Shakespeare’s iconic power was employed both to mask the barbarism and to access the emancipatory potential embedded in The Tempest.
