In this poem and reflection, Johana Souvenance identifies education as a core concern for both Rodó and Retamar. Both authors see education as a tool of cultural control that can be manipulated to maintain or challenge existing hierarchies and power structures.

This poem explores the many different kinds of “education” that structure U.S. society today. Although we often focus on the kind of education that happens in the classroom, Souvenance points out that everything we see and read and do constitutes a kind of education. The poem offers a subtle connection to the aesthetic concerns that are so prominent in Ariel by criticizing the beauty industry. Introducing X to represent forced education further connects Souvenance’s ideas to Caliban’s overt rebellion in Aimé Césaire’s A Tempest.

Marc Pagan’s video project “Scenes from the Tempest” offers a thoughtful — and beautiful — interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. By limiting himself to visual rather than textual cues, he is able to explore how visual symbols can tell a story effectively. These symbols include the horse mask worn by Caliban: the horse-face retains Shakespeare’s association between Caliban and the natural or bestial world, but by using a mass-produced rubber mask, Pagan shows how this association has been manufactured by humans and obscures his true face. Additionally, a water-logged iPhone becomes a symbol of Caliban’s power to give Miranda access to information, while a set of earbuds symbolizes the language that Miranda gives to Caliban. Read Pagan’s reflection here.

In “The New York Tempest,” Akash Kumar takes Shakespeare’s emphasis on illusion, stagecraft, and control, and explores these themes in a modern setting. By casting the noblemen as film executives and the slaves as assistants, this play offers a subtle critique of the labor practices in the film industry. The final image reveals Prospero as a tragic character who cannot escape from the world he created. Kumar deftly transforms the audience’s relationship to the fourth wall in the final lines: while Shakespeare’s Prospero makes us aware of the play as a play by addressing the audience directly, Kumar’s Prospero makes us aware of the play as a play by demonstrating his own inability to distinguish between illusion and reality. Like Césaire, Kumar gives us a Prospero who cannot be freed from his own delusions. Read Kumar’s reflection here.

In this abstract expressionist painting, A. K. Evans borrows the “zip” from Barnett Newman’s Onement series in order to call attention to the doubling or duality of characters in both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Aimée Césaire’s A Tempest. A tree-like line bisects a field of blue (perhaps a clear sky, or perhaps another reference to Newman’s work), while uneven ovals of yellow ochre and raw umber, reminiscent of standing men, face off across the divide. Both colors, however, are supported by the dark stripe at the bottom of the painting, which could be representative of stormy water, or the island, or the uncertain line of the horizon, where an optical illusion appears to erase the distinction between land, sea, and sky. The visual symmetry between the roots and the branches and between “Caliban” and “Ariel” implies a deep connection across difference not only for Caliban and Ariel, but also for colonizer and colonized. These dualities, Evans’s painting implies, coexist with unities of system. Read Evans’s reflection here.

“Prospero vs. Caliban,” a rap battle between Neil Koshy and Rahul Soni, explores the exaggerated antipathy between Prospero and Caliban while commenting on the importance of performativity in The Tempest itself. The two raps draw on both Shakespeare’s The Tempest and José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel, which uses the characters from The Tempest to argue for a Eurocentric Latin American aesthetic distinct from the dominating culture of the United States.

Koshy begin’s by portraying Rodó’s Prospero arguing for a “new era/ Where values are fixed on true beauty and education.” Kokshy allows this preoccupation with aesthetics to guide the insults Prospero directs at Caliban and the U.S. The final couplet, which rhymes “power” with “shower,” reiterates the central claim of Koshy’s implicit argument: that Rodó’s fixation on aesthetics (a shower) veils a deeper concern for the aesthetics of power.

Soni responds with careful attention to Caliban’s speech. Of course by making Caliban an actor in a rap battle, Soni gives him agency and a voice that is largely denied in The Tempest and to some extent recuperated in Aimée Césaire’s A Tempest. Soni’s Caliban turns Prospero’s words back on him— he may be called “ugly,” but he reclaims the power to define himself through his “beautiful speech.” At the conclusion, a throwaway connection to “alternative facts” and the Trump administration offers commentary on power dynamics of the current political climate, as well as on the power (or magic) of speech to shape reality. Finally, by claiming victory for Caliban in the rap battle and denying Prospero the audience’s “release,” this project, like A Tempest, literally gives Caliban the final word, demonstrating his ultimate power over Prospero, the shape of his narrative, and us as the audience.

Watch the live performance here.

Aisha Zaraei’s series of three poems shows an unusual degree of sympathy and compassion for the characters in The Tempest. Normally when we produce literary scholarship, we end up treating all the characters as symbols, allegories, or figures for larger concepts about human nature, social structures, and world historical forces. By choosing to respond to the play in a series of first-person-narrated poems, rather than in a traditional scholarly essay, Zaraei is able to retain the characters’ humanity. This form also allows her to give each of the three characters an equal voice, subtly shifting the focus of this project toward the more marginalized characters as Miranda and Caliban are able to address the audience directly, a privilege Shakespeare reserves for Prospero. Each poem takes as its focus the emotional motivations of the characters, and in “Caliban’s Cry” Zaraei subtly indicates how similar their motivations are when we focus on that emotional element: Caliban, like Miranda, “dreams” of another life; Caliban, like Prospero, is “plotting” his revenge. Read Zaraei’s reflection here.