gift of “civilized” language to the colonized gives the colonized the power to express that which
had been previously inexpressible. Inasmuch as the colonized possesses any power, it is only
that power given to him or her by the colonizer. Before Miranda taught Caliban language, he
“wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish” (l.ii.359-360). Caliban’s native identity was no
identity at all, according to the traditional reading, and being taught the colonizer’s speech and
mannerisms in essence changes him from a mere “thing most brutish” to an individual finally
able to understand his own thoughts (l.ii.358-360).
By contrast, a postcolonial reading of this passage would emphasize the hybrid nature
of Caliban’s identity as civilized native, which is to say that Caliban neither exemplifies a
civilized colonizer nor an uncivilized native person. As Homi Bhabha states, “ [i]t is not the
Colonialist Self or the Colonised other, but the disturbing distance in between that constitutes
the figure of colonial otherness - the White man's artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body”
(45). Miranda having taught Caliban to speak does not amount to the transformation of a
native non-being into a civilized being like the colonizer, but rather it results in the native
becoming a hybrid identity that defies ready identification as either native or colonizer.
Caliban’s power, then, arises from the fact that the colonizer is incapable of appropriating him
completely. Loomba similarly states that “[t]he ambivalence of colonial discourses indicates a
failure of authority smoothly to impose itself upon those it seeks to govern” (145). Postcolonial
readings of this sort emphasize, not the extent to which Caliban has lost power and been
assimilated by the colonizer, but the extent to which he retains power as a result of his hybrid
identity.
After their introduction in the 1960s and 70s, postcolonial interpretations of The
Tempest quickly became popular in scholarly circles, and by the 1980s, the traditional readings
were widely derided by critics. Scholars still adhering to the traditional interpretation of the play
risked “being demonized as ‘idealist’ or ‘aestheticist’ or ‘essentialist’" (Felperin 171). The play
became so identified with colonization of the New World and issues around slavery in America
that some critics found it necessary to devote “considerable polemical energy to arguing that
The Tempest might be about something other than (or rather, something in addition to)
colonialism" (Halpern 265). In fact, critics in other countries have been reluctant to embrace
The Tempest as useful in their own contexts due to the strong identification with New World
colonialism that Postcolonial scholars have insisted upon when interpreting the play. For
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