Owning the Weather

Reading The Tempest After Hurricane Katrina

Authors

William Boelhower Louisiana State University

Abstract

After the untold effects of hurricane Katrina on the gulf coast of Louisiana and its major city, New Orleans, it is hard for me, a recent Louisiana resident, not to appreciate the overwhelming presence of wild weather in such an important and familiar work as Shakespeare's The Tempest. A few decades ago the Polish émigré Jan Kott unforgettably taught us that Shakespeare is indeed our contemporary. And it is with this in mind and still trembling from the capricious havoc Katrina wreaked on the island of New Orleans that we must take the play's hardly latent climatological interests seriously — as the very image of the play itself. The spectacle and panic and terror that the apparently bad-tempered Prospero generates on command and at the expense of his enemies suggests that he is quite willing to engineer the island's primeval environment for his gain and pleasure. A magician of Promethean stature, the deposed Duke's actions thrust him in the company of all those terrorists who will stop short of nothing to get their way. Prospero is nothing less than a terrorist of air.

Author Biography

William Boelhower, Louisiana State University

William Boelhower, co-editor of the Routledge journal Atlantic Studies and of the Routledge Atlantic Studies book series, is the Robert Thomas and Rita Wetta Adams Professor of Atlantic and Ethnic Studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. He has recently edited the volume New Orleans in the Atlantic World: Between Land and Sea. His essays have appeared in such journals as Symbiosis, Prose Studies, Paterson Literary Review, Atlantic Studies, American Literary History, Early American Literature,Contemporary Literature, and in the ejournals 49th Parallel and the journal of transnational american studies. He is coeditor of the volumes Public Space, Private Lives: Race, Gender, Class and Citizenship in New York, 1890-1929; Working Sites: Text, Territory and Cultural Capital; Sites of Ethnicity, Europe and America; and translator and critic of the works of Antonio Gramsci and Lucien Goldmann. His books Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature and Immigrant Autobiography contributed to the paradigm-formation of multi-ethnic studies in Europe and the United States. His recent research deals with the sociology of literature, cartographic semiosis, and Atlantic World literatures and cultures.