Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora
Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson
Abstract
This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are co ... More
This book seeks to explain the prominence of Sophocles' Theban plays among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African diaspora. It argues that the Theban plays reflect on three themes which have become crucial in the postcolonial context: identity, the grounding of civilization on barbarism, and transmission of culture over time and space. To adapt the Theban dramas is thus a massively theoretical as well as an audaciously practical act, because they have been installed as the script that both legislates and explains how they, and indeed all other cultural artefacts, are conveyed. African, Afro-Caribbean and African-American adaptations engage with the cultural politics of the so-called Western canon, and use their self-consciously literary status variously to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and the place of the Greek ‘originals’, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book is informed by and contributes to postcolonial theory and theories of classical reception. In particular, it develops a new analytic concept, the ‘Black Aegean’, with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonialist discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates through the plays the later debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena.
Keywords:
Sophocles,
Theban plays,
Greek tragedies,
African adaptations,
postcolonial theory,
classical reception,
cultural politics,
Western canon,
Black Atlantic,
Black Athena
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2007 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199217182 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2008 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199217182.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Barbara Goff, author
Reader in Classics, Department of Classics, University of Reading
Author Webpage
Michael Simpson, author
Lecturer, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London
Author Webpage
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