Addicted to race: Performativity, agency, and Cesaire's A tempest

Cesaire also adds an additional deity, the Yoruba trickster god Eshu, to those who bless the marriage of the young couple. In its representation of racial identity, the play further deviates from the Shakespearean text when it prescribes cross-race casting through the use of masks. In a brief prologue to the play, a Master of Ceremonies distributes these to the attendant cast in a seemingly arbitrary manner: "Help yourselves . . .You, Prospero? And why not? . .You, Caliban? I don't see why not...." (Cesaire 1969b, 9). Cesaire specifies that he wrote the play for a theatre negre, an all-black company; since Caliban, Ariel, and Eshu are the only characters of color, adherence to Cesaire's indications would necessitate the cross-race casting of the white Europeans, that is to say, the majority of the roles.

The staging strategies of A Tempest promote the political views of its author. Unlike the biologically rooted racial identity celebrated his contemporaries, most notably in the poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Cesaire's negritude separates racial identity from natural or biological attribution in order to signal its historicity, and consequently its mutability. His use of cross-race casting and masks in A Tempest evokes the figurative masks of Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and underscores the contingency of the characters' racial identity. Caliban's angry final tirade explicitly links this staging practice to the colonial ideology of race:

Prospero, tu es un grand illusioniste: / le mensonge, ca te connait. / Et tu m'as tellement menti, / menti sur le monde, menti sur moi-meme, / que tu as fini par m'imposer / une image de moi-meme: / Un sous-developpe, comme tu dis / un sous-capable, / voila comment tu m'as oblige A me voir, / et cette image, je la hais! Et elle est fausse! (Cesaire 1969b, 88) [Prospero, you are a great illusionist: deception knows you well. And you have lied to me so much, lied about the world, about myself, that you finally imposed an image on me, an image of myself, an "underdeveloped" you say, an "under achiever," that is how you have made me see myself, and I hate this image! It is false!]

The masks emblematize the repressive identity category into which Caliban has been interpellated, and in which he has misrecognized himself as an inferior. In his final prise de conscience, Caliban denounces this image's apparently natural and essential grounding-Prospero's meteorological machinations further betray the human mediation of all that is "natural"-to reveal, to himself, to the other characters, and to the spectators, the history of power relations that generated and perpetuated it to his detriment.

By clearly separating the character's identity from the gesture of its performance, Cesaire's desired staging falls squarely in the tradition of Brecht's theater of alienation. Indeed, the use of masks would seem to exemplify the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, or "alienation effect," which distances the characters' perception of the world around them to reveal what they do not see about the social, economic, and political situation that shapes their identity and determines their life's course. In Cesaire's case, the masks serve to reveal race as a historical regime of power relations, and to alienate the characters' assumption that the status quo of race relations on the island is somehow "natural." For the spectator, this split vision discredits the claim to referentiality or "truth" of identities represented by the literal masks. It also betrays the figurative ideological "masks" of identity that Prospero propagates in the dehumanizing discourse he systematically directs at Caliban, revealing it as a rhetoric of power and oppression whose claim to "naturalness" is enforced only by the technological superiority he so jealously guards. The play of masks likewise implicates Gonzalo's no less dehumanizing idealization of the island and its "noble savages."