union of Europe and Africa, Claribel and the Tunisian king, has promised
a “prosperous “return” ( 2. 1. 72 ).
But if Africa is here a touchstone of meaning and comfort, it is also
one that is being newly, if accidentally, bypassed. The sequence of events
that Prospero crafts in order to enable his return to Europe and his daugh-
ter’s marriage to Ferdinand upstages Claribel’s unstaged marriage to the
king of Tunis. The future of Italy comes to lie, therefore, not in the pros-
perous bond that has taken shape in the established space of Africa but in
the unpredictable relations that are taking shape before our eyes in the un-
charted terrains of the island. If there is one thing that the play under-
scores, it is that this “new world” requires different terms of approach and
accommodation, different kinds of improvisation, different interpretations
of the familiar and the “strange,” of the “thing[s] of darkness” one must
“acknowledge,” even own ( 5. 1. 289 , 275 – 76 ). The “English diaspora” began
to mark and hold its ground, in fact, with narratives such as Strachey’s.^3
AndThe Tempestitself represents (that is, both is and figures) a certain
turning point in the history and literature of England’s move into “the
world,” dramatizing an evolving shift of interest from the multilayered,
culturally mixed exchanges in the Mediterranean to a hugely promising, if
uncertain, future in the west.
This is not the end of the story of complex racial and cultural inscription,
of course, but in a way another beginning. For although the evolution of chat-
tel slavery in the New World would catalyze the stabilization of a recogniza-
ble racism against “black” subjects, early encounters with the Indians there
brought a new kind of “darkness” into the picture, unsettling the still unset-
tled terms of difference that circulated around African subjects. The Tempest’s
Caliban has proven over time to be unusually unreadable—perhaps as much,
though not in the same way, as the Moor—his image occupying a range of
places on a spectrum of civility and savagery which it also simultaneously de-
fined.^4 Within the play, while Caliban is to some a “hag-born” and “poison-
ous slave” ( 1. 2. 283 , 319 ), a “misshapen knave,” a “demi-devil” ( 5. 1. 268 , 272 ), to
others, a “fish” ( 2. 2. 25 ), it is nonetheless hard to tell where his language stops
and Prospero’s (and Miranda’s) begins. Set him next to Miranda, the circum-
scribed daughter, or Ferdinand, the temporarily enslaved prince, as the play
demands that we do, and Caliban’s position as a cultural subject seems all the
more unpredictable, uncodified, open-ended. Prospero may claim “this thing
of darkness” as his own, but what is to happen then? As the Europeans pre-
pare to return to Europe, Caliban stands before them (and us) as an incom-
192 conclusion