A Techno-colored Tempest : Racism, Slavery, Witchcraft, and the Nation in Giuvlipen's Roma Adaptation of Shakespeare

Giuvlipen's 2024 adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest —written and directed by Mihaela Drăgan under the title Caliban and the Witch —interrogates the institutions of enslavement and oppression shaping Roma and Romanian histories. The production articulates a discourse on race, class, and gender that contributes to broader conversations on racialized and feminized exploitation within global histories of enslavement. Casting Roma as neither Black nor Brown but "techno-colored," the adaptation exposes the reduction of difference to cosmetic tints layered over essentialized black-and-white binaries. Giuvlipen plots a course out of the unimaginative gray zones into a vibrant future beyond repressive nationalized, racialized, and sexualized foreclosures of being.