Whose tempest? Performance philosophy and/as decolonial cacophony

This essay offers a theoretical model by which to understand the colonial location of Sycorax, Caliban, Ariel, Miranda, Claribel, and Prospero throughout various rewritings of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The chapter’s decolonial interpretation unpacks the settler colonial logics of elimination, exclusion, and fungibility by which all of these characters are unequally (dis)located on the stage of world-history. The chapter explains how these logics help us to expand on Jodi Byrd’s analysis of ‘decolonial cacophony’, a reading practice that actively contests Eurocentric and universalistic structures of power, by attending to the logics by which this field’s conceptual characters are aesthetically distributed.