The American Classicisms working group is delighted to invite you to a discussion with Professor Moira Fradinger (Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University) on her monograph Antígonas:Writing from Latin America (2023), to take place November 30, 4:00-5:00 pm, in Phelps Hall 401, with Zoom-in option as well.
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To quote Oxford Academic’s abstract:
The first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America, this interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies, classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theater history. It tracks the ways in which, since the early nineteenth century, fragments of Antigone’s myth and tragedy have been persistently cannibalized and ruminated throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, quilted to local dramatic forms, revealing an archive of political thought about Latin America’s heterogeneous neocolonial histories. The book constructs a corpus of over seventy vernacular Antígona plays and studies its intra-American variations and patterns across time, finding a continental set of interrelated discourses about politics, womanhood, motherhood, sisterhood, and, to a certain extent, burials. Antígona is consistently characterized as a national mother and, as the twentieth century advances, multiplied on stage, forming female collectives, foregrounding the urgency of systemic change or staging gender politics. As it examines classical culture in neocolonial contexts, the book explores ways of reading Creole texts from the geopolitical South that disrupt the colonial reading protocols that deracinate texts or lock them into locality. By historicizing Antígona plays and interpreting them with homegrown terminology that addresses specific colonial legacies, the book reveals how Antígona has ceased being Greek and instead tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Antígonas rethinks the paradigms through which we understand the presence of ancient cultural materials in former colonial territories, while illuminating an understudied continent in Anglophone reception studies.
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To receive future announcements for this event, please register by Tuesday, November 28. Recommended readings and Zoom link will be circulated to participants in advance. Please feel free to reach out to the event organizers, Catherine Saterson (catherine.saterson@yale.edu) and Kirsten Traudt (kirsten.traudt@yale.edu).