The Postcolonial Tempest: Response to Peter Hulme’s ‘Stormy Weather’
Loomba, Ania
Early Modern Culture, No. 3 (2003)
Abstract
Peter Hulme’s ‘Stormy Weather’ is, as the author remarks, one of four pieces in Early Modern Culture that contribute to a recent ‘debate about quotation, paraphrase, and misreading’. This debate focuses on a particular aspect of a larger controversy about the politics of literary and cultural criticism, and the place of Shakespeare within it. In his essay, ‘Selective Quotation’, Alan Sinfield had complained that ‘a reductive version of cultural materialism is manufactured’ by some of its critics, supported by selective quotation, and then censured as insufficiently complex. It is as if any attempt to bring Shakespeare into contact with a wider political reality is so threatening that it must be positioned instantly as both crass and malign.’ In a response to Sinfield, David Siar has pointed out that in fact some of Sinfield’s critics display a lack of any serious or sustained engagement with the theoretical assumptions or working methods of materialist literary criticism. Hulme now makes many of the same points as Sinfield and Siar, even as he shifts the debate by considering how it is staged in relation to postcolonial criticism of The Tempest. He takes the misreadings of his own influential 1985 essay, ‘Nymphs and Reapers’ (written jointly with Francis Barker) as the test case.
Click here to read/download this article (HTML file)
Related posts:
- “Talking about Pennies” and the Dialectical Challange: A Response to Alan Sinfield’s “Selective Quotation”
- Selective Quotation
- Response to Margreta de Grazia’s “Hamlet’s Thoughts and Antics”
- Gee, Your Heir Smells Terrific: Response to “Shakespeare’s Perfume”
- Oh, Dear, What Can the Matter Be?: A Response to Peter Stallybrass’s “The Value of Culture and the Disavowal of Things”