Re-Encountering the Encounter - February 28-March 2 2013
Miranda famously declares at the conclusion of The Tempest that she now exists in a "Brave new world." This oft-quoted line is frequently misremembered as referring to the enchanted island itself, when in actuality she only utters it upon first encountering all of the Europeans who've been shipwrecked on the island. As Prospero makes clear to his daughter, in fact Miranda's new world is an old world. This scene in Shakespeare's most colonial of plays subverts our expectations of what "encounter" means in a New World context. In this panel we will look at narratives that upend the standard representations of encounter in the early modern age of exploration, that convert new world into old, and old into new.