Challenging Shakespeare’s colonial and racist orientations : re-visioning the tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day

الملخص EN

This paper seeks to examine how William Shakespeare’s colonial, sexist, and racial orientations are challenged in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day as a postcolonial novel that appropriates The Tempest to invert Shakespeare’s racial and sexist biases.

The paper also seeks to prove that Naylor’s novel appropriates Shakespeare specifically as the iconic playwright whose universal and timeless value could be adjusted to address the issue of racism and colonial heritage in America.

Particularly, the paper employs postcolonial and feminist literary criticism to highlight the ways in which Naylor appropriates the racist tendencies of Shakespeare’s plays through creating an ideal “negrified” and “feminized” narrative.

The paper argues that Shakespeare’s universal and timeless value could be proven even through authors who consider him more as a foe than an idol.

Moreover, one argues in this paper that Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day is a vivid example of the usefulness of literature in driving the American society towards cultural peace through spreading ideals of global understanding.

The paper starts by highlighting the colonial tendencies of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, followed by a detailed analysis of Naylor’s method in defying the racist and stereotypical representations of non-European races through creating a whole-black utopian community.

The paper then investigates the feminist and anti-sexist representations of female characters in Naylor’s novel through flipping gender roles and granting black females total authority as a way of defying the myth of the supreme white European male.