A cartography of the savage: between the Caliban trope and the daughters of Sycorax

Abstract

Latin America can be mapped as the Great Canibalia. This operates as a political fiction that organizes what is sayable and thinkable with respect to the affects that constitute the "truth" about Latin America. However, it has not always been understood in the same way. For this reason, it is necessary to keep a certain interested distance on the debate on its historical truth. In order to see about it not the opportunity to find the historical facts that support it, but the possibility of reflecting on the colonial conformation of the ideologies of modernity. I propose here to think on the colonial situation. This arises from the encounter between the "civilized" and the "primitives”; the “colonizer” and the “Indian”. We will recover a feminist reading of The Tempest by analysing the figure of Sycorax. This allows us to analyse at a micropolitical level the form of subjectivation in order to inscribes "another relationship" in that classic work of Shakespeare. Sycorax is a character who, from the silence of the invisible, set out to welcome the movements of desire from the vibrating body, activating what Suely Rolnik called a “new softness”.