Stevens, Scott Manning. "Indigenous sovereignty and The Tempest." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/indigenous-sovereignty-and-the-tempest. [Date accessed].

Indigenous sovereignty and The Tempest

A reading list to consider further the question of Indigenous sovereignty in The Tempest.

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Scott Manning Stevens
Syracuse University

Byrd, Jodi A. “Mind the Gap: Indigenous Sovereignty and the Antinomes of Empire, The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. 

Engelking, Wojciech. “Caliban as Legal Subject: The Tempest and Renaissance Juridical Thought,” Law and Humanities, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2023.2298001.

Greenblatt, Stephen J. “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge Press, 1990.

Seed, Patricia. “‘This island’s mine’: Caliban and Native Sovereignty,” The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. Peter Hulme. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Stevens, Scott Manning. “Monstrous Indigeneity and the Discourse of Race in Shakespeare’s England,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Race, ed. Patricia Akhimie. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.

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Further learning

Video

Indigenous sovereignty

Scott Manning Stevens dives into the history of sovereignty and indigeneity, defining the relationship these concepts have to the past, present, and future of Native peoples' self-determination across North America.

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Essay

The resources of sovereignty on Caliban’s island

Close reading opportunities to engage students in discussions of sovereignty and self-determination in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

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The false conflation of indigeneity and race

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Selected readings to contextualize Shakespeare and indigeneity in your classroom.

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