ABSTRACT
Created for Cuba’s Teatro Buendía, Raquel Carrió and Flora Lauten’s Otra Tempestad (Another Tempest, 1998) eventually toured internationally, with a stop at Shakespeare’s Globe in London as part of their “Globe to Globe” season in 1998. Otra Tempestad’s transition from performing for local audiences in the Caribbean to audiences from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds fits with the play’s approach to colonialism. By writing their Tempest as a study of globalization, Carrió and Lauten challenge the idea that postcolonial revision must also be an attack. Rather than emphasizing the binary opposition of colonizer and colonized, Otra Tempestad re-routes the postcolonial to demonstrate cross-cultural communication. Combining Yoruban mythology and Shakespearean drama with a Caribbean setting, the play explores the clashing and blending of the Old and New Worlds. Carrió and Lauten’s emphasis on cultural syncretism establishes their play as a hybrid text that demonstrates the mixing and merging of racial and national identities. Otra Tempestad incorporates textual and cultural elements from Africa and Europe to create a uniquely mestizo Caribbean Shakespeare, using The Tempest (Shakespeare 2004) to emphasize a multicultural postcolonial perspective.
