SOURCE: Scheie, Timothy. “Addicted to Race: Performativity, Agency, and Césaire's A Tempest.” College Literature 25, no. 2 (spring 1998): 17-29.

In the following essay, Scheie elucidates the “potential for a subversive performativity in A Tempest, specifically in the final scene's enactment of racial identity as addiction.”

A profound sense of spectacle pervades the dramatic writings of Aimé Césaire. Unabashedly political in their critique of simplistic, accepted readings of racial and national identity, these plays do not preach to the spectator, nor do they purport to mirror a reality through the conventions of mimetic theater. A lucid and frequently ironic deployment of theatricality lends them a complexity that resists a realist mise-en-scène, and that leads theater practitioners and spectators alike to ponder the implications of the foregrounded performance of identity. In both the characters represented and the gesture of their representation, Césaire questions complex and unstable racial categories...