SOURCE: “Caliban Versus Miranda: Race and Gender Conflicts in Postcolonial Rewritings of The Tempest,” in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, edited by Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 191-209.

In the following essay, Singh studies postcolonial readings of The Tempest, which emphasize the role of Caliban as a prototype of the modern revolutionary due to his engagement in a power struggle with Prospero.

Caliban and Decolonization

I cannot read The Tempest without recalling the adventures of those voyages reported in Hakluyt; and when I remember the voyages and the particular period in African history, I see The Tempest against the background of England's experimentation in colonisation … The Tempest was also prophetic of a political future which is our present. Moreover, the circumstances of my life, both as colonial and exiled descendant of Caliban in the twentieth century is an...