Caliban no divã: a Psicologia da colonização de Mannoni e a resposta decolonial de Frantz Fanon

Abstract

This article analyses Shakespeare’s character Caliban, present in The Tempest (1611), through two visions: the colonizing one developed by the French author Mannoni (1990) and the counter-colonizing epistemology by the Martinican writer Fanon (2008). Initially, it approaches the Shakespearean concept-character beyond the Eurocentric vision, taken up and revised by the Cuban writer Roberto Retamar in his famous essay written in 1971, which repossesses Caliban as the one who breaks away from his colonial shackles. Like Retamar, Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), emerged as a voice criticizing the colonizing thinking of Octave Mannoni in Psychology of Colonization (1950) – later also published as Prospero and Caliban (1956). In the light of decolonial currents, Fanon rejects the “Prospero Complex” asserted by Mannoni, re-reading and re-establishing parameters contrary to the Inferiority Complex proposed by the French author, who understands the colonizer as superior, the “civilized” in relation to the colonized. Corroborating Fanon, Bhabha (1998) appears here to advocate cultural hybridity in studies on the alterity between subjects and their places in the world.