Césaire, Aimé--Criticism and interpretation

This thesis takes a postcolonial, critical race, and monster theory approach to understanding Caliban as a “monstrous” figure, primarily because of threat of miscegenation within the ideological power structure of the Caribbean slave plantation system as depicted in A Tempest by Aimé Césaire. Through the lens of Louis Althusser’s theory on the construction of ideologies and recognizing race as an ideology, this thesis asserts that the colonized subject is interpellated or hailed as a “monster,” thereby allowing the colonizer to moralize and rationalize their altruicide and dehumanization of the colonized subject. Prospero, the colonial master serves as the arbiter of white masculine power whereby his phallus can be understood as a “characteristic feature of making horror and pleasure coincide” (Mbembe, Postcolony 175). When Caliban, the colonized subject, refuses to function within the interpellated identity of the “monster,” he attempts to redeem his lost honor by interpellating himself as a “BLACK MAN” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 95). Prospero regards this as a threat to deconstruct the ideology of race and destroy his colonial legacy through an “unholy miscegenation” between Caliban and Miranda, his daughter, thus transforming them into “monsters.” The colonial master’s response to this attempted usurpation of phallic power results in the recourse to honor killing which Achille Mbembe identifies as altruicide—the altruistic homicide of the “monster,” of the colonized subject, that plagues society as a threat against whiteness (Critique of Black Reason 10).