L'identità mobile: Snapshots of Caliban

Abstract

The article aims at investigating a rewrite of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Snapshots of Caliban by the Indian writer and poet Suniti Namjoshi. An adaptation that reinterprets the shakespearian play as a manifesto of emancipation, distorting its structure through a series of radical transformations such as: the reduction and the characterization of the dramatis personae, the shift from a dramatic form to a poetic form, and, especially, Caliban’s transmutation in woman. One aspect, the latter, that distorts the identity of the shakespearean prototype, reversing the atavistic binarism between Prospero and Caliban, into the more flexible between Miranda and Caliban. A replacement that reduces the political interpretation of the work, directing it towards a gender trajectory. Namjoshi, in fact, softens the stiffness and the intransigence of the male in the more negotiable and reconciling form of female. The result is more a connection than a crash, to paraphrase Auden, perhaps the real source of inspiration of "Snapshots", capable of leading to a definition and awareness of the self, of an identity recognizable even in its incessant dynamism. The text will be decoded by making reference to postcolonial theories found in Third Space (Homi Bhabba), Hybridism as opposed to Essentialism and Ignacio Matte Blanco’s Bi-logic.