식민지근대와 ‘되받아쓰기’: 셰익스피어와 쎄제르

Abstract

Given that colonial modernity is a highly complex historical phenomenon in which all kinds of binary oppositions are just superficially valid, overcoming coloniality demands a correspondingly arduous task; it should be analytical as well as synthetical. In the literary arena, the writing-back of the authors of the South is arguably one of the most challenging attempts to get the better of such modernity. Taking up Césaire’s subversive rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and facing right unto the mainstream of postcolonial study, this paper argues that his critical appropriation of Shakespeare’s text asks for a rigorously synthesizing reading. By comparing and contrasting the two texts, this paper reaches a tentative conclusion: in spite of the fact that Césaire’s reworking still has some worthwhile merits particularly germane to current ‘post’-colonial worldwide reality, his work of integrating shakespeare’s language into an artistico-political vision as a project of withstanding colonial modernity is carried over to the future. In this vein, postcolonial scholars’ academic bias and their consequent evaluative inflation of Césaire’s A Tempest are critically examined in passing.