Racism and Language in A Tempest

and Black Skin White Masks

Prepared by
Rohit Vyas
M.A. English, Semester 3 (2019-2021)
Email: rohitvyas277@gmail.com
Paper: 11 Postcolonial Studies (Unit 1)
Submitted to : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of
English, M.K. Bhavnagar University
 Key Objectives
- To throw light on the race based
descrimination
- Role of language in this dynamics
- Concluding with a catch call.
- Text taken as base : A Tempest, Black Skin
White Masks
 Black Lives Matter

Our lives begin to end

the day we become
silent about things that
matter. - Martin Luther
King Jr.
 How the rally got the voice. . .

Garner, 43, died after Pantaleo placed him in a banned

chokehold during a botched arrest over the alleged sale of
untaxed cigarettes more than five years ago. The incident
was captured on cellphone video that showed Garner
shouting “I can’t breathe” 11 times.

His final words became a rallying cry for the Black Lives
Matter movement that protested around the US in the wake
of Garner’s death and the death of black teenager Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a month later. (Laughland)
 Language Please !

To speak means … above all to assume a culture, to support

the weight of a civilization - Fanon

Caliban: You taught me language, and my profit on't

Is, I know how to curse: the red plague rid you,
For learning me your language! (Shakespeare)
 Binary of Black and White

When a black man arrives in France it is not only the language that
changes him. He is changed also because it is from France that he
received his knowledge of Mostesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, but
also because France gave him his physicians, his department head,
his innumerable little functionaries. (Forewords by Ziauddin Sardar
and Homi K. Bhabha ,XV)
 Caliban at his best
CALIBAN: In the first place, that's not true. You didn't teach
me a thing! Except to jabber in your own language so that I
could understand your orders... (Cesairé, 11-12)

CALIBAN: Call me X. That would be best. Like a man

without a name. Or, to be more precise, a man whose name
is stolen... Every time you summon me it reminds me of a
basic fact, the fact that you've stolen everything from me,
even my identity! Uhuru! (Cesairé, 15)
 Calling spade a spade...

The stage of the world belongs to all of different races.

It is the word “FREEDOM” that Cesaire wants
everyone, the colonized and the colonizer alike, to
hear. It is a cry for freedom or decolonization all over
the world. (Fei)

We all need to be as bold and rebellious like Cesaire’s

Caliban who speaks for himself and speaks truth to
power.
Works Cited
● Césaire, Aimé. A Tempest: Based on Shakespeare's The Tempest, Adaptation for a Black
Theatre. Translated by Richard Miller, PDF, Ubu Repertory Theater Publications, 1992.

● Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles L. Markmann, PDF,
Pluto P, 2008.

● Fei, Liang. "A Call for Freedom: Aime Cesaire’s A Tempest." Canadian Social Science,
vol. 3, no. 5,
http://www.cscanada.net/index.php/css/article/view/j.css.1923669720070305.021/465.
www.cscanada.net/index.php/css/index.

● Laughland, Oliver. "'I Can't Breathe': NYPD Fires Officer Who Put Eric Garner in
Chokehold." The Guardian, 20 Aug. 2019,
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/19/eric-garner-daniel-pantaleo-nypd-officer.

● Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. PDF, Freeditorial, 1734.