Abstract
Vincent Lloyd’s 2016 book Black Natural Law presents four case histories in which African American intellectuals used the natural law tradition to mount defenses of the rights, capacities, and dignity of members of their communities. This essay uses the discourse of black natural law as reconstructed by Lloyd to reread Caliban’s political arguments and social and aesthetic project in The Tempest. Although the natural law tradition became increasingly secularized during the century of revolution, black thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr. drew on the religious renditions of natural law that were alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Reading Shakespeare with black natural law is not simply an audacious leap into our troubled present, but also brings new focus on the forms of scripturally-inspired pluralism that natural law theory supported in Shakespeare’s age.
Highlights
American intellectuals used the natural law tradition to mount defenses of the rights, capacities, and dignity of members of their communities
I have taken the presence of Shakespeare in Lloyd’s powerful treatise as an invitation to consider the extent to which Caliban’s claim to embody a creaturely humanity in opposition to the punitive actions of Prospero can be captured within a natural law tradition that culminates in the African-American discourse on human dignity that Lloyd reconstructs in Black Natural Law
A scholar of religious studies and a historian of black theology, tunes into the Scriptural strain that stamps black natural law, whose writers took the idea of humanity created in the image of God as the basis of dignity and equality for all people
Summary
Lloyd’s book recovers a natural law theology and politics in the works of four African-American thinkers and leaders: Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. Of natural law; Lloyd focuses on the “process,” not the “product,” of BNL (black natural law) Lloyd presents his BNL thinkers as lenders as well as borrowers: “European or Catholic natural law traditions can learn much from the black natural law tradition. BNL builds on the cosmopolitan and egalitarian aspects of European natural law, with special emphasis on the idea of humanity as imago dei put forward by the three monotheisms. From Dante to Du Bois, the soul as virtuous capacity and divine imprint asserts the creaturely dimension of natural law, grounded in a primal landscape and flowing into neighboring construals of natura, including human nature, the state of nature, and the natural world. Creature Caliban, who is Caliban ensouled, participates in that story
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