• DOI:10.1086/448408
• Corpus ID: 155000165

Caribbean and African Appropriations of "The Tempest"

@article{Nixon1987CaribbeanAA,
  title={Caribbean and African Appropriations of "The Tempest"},
  author={Rob Nixon},
  journal={Critical Inquiry},
  year={1987},
  volume={13},
  pages={557 - 578}
}

• R. Nixon
• Published 1 April 1987
• History
• Critical Inquiry

The era from the late fifties to the early seventies was marked in Africa and the Caribbean by a rush of newly articulated anticolonial sentiment that was associated with the burgeoning of both international black consciousness and more localized nationalist movements. Between 1957 and 1973 the vast majority of African and the larger Caribbean colonies won their independence; the same period witnessed the Cuban and Algerian revolutions, the latter phase of the Kenyan "Mau Mau" revolt, the Katanga crisis in the Congo, the Trinidadian Black Power uprising and, equally important for the atmosphere of militant defiance, the civil rights movement in the United States, the student revolts of 1968, and the humbling of the United States during the Vietnam War. This period was distinguished, among Caribbean and African intellectuals, by a pervasive mood of optimistic outrage. Frequently graduates of British or French universities, they were the first generation from their regions self-assured and numerous enough to call collectively for a renunciation of Western standards as the political revolts found their cultural counterparts in insurrections against the bequeathed values of the colonial powers. In the context of such challenges to an increasingly discredited European colonialism, a series of dissenting intellectuals chose to utilize a