Reading A Tempest, by Aimé Césaire

The border as a Critical Apparatus for Interrogating Power

Abstract

A Tempest: adaptation for a black theatre, by Aimé Césaire, can be read as a critical intervention into the modern regime of representation, where language, history, and universality operate as apparatuses legitimizing colonial power. This article proposes a reading of the text through the concept of the border, understood as a space of friction in which the conditions of meaning production are reconfigured. From this perspective, the play is not organized around a logic of inversion nor a narrative of historical transcendence; rather, it sustains an active field of tensions in which structural violence is reinscribed on stage and within bodies. The notion of the border thus allows attention to the displacements that traverse language, character construction, and relations of power without reducing conflict to a binary opposition. Within this framework, A tempest emerges as a critical gesture that does not foreclose meaning but instead keeps it in dispute.