Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts

Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts
Author: Ana Filipa Prata
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2024-06-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 1040034403

This interdisciplinary volume explores the ancient Greek myth of Medea and its global analogues found in other mythic and folk tales of deadly, exiled women, such as those of La Malinche and La Llorona, examining the connections between these figures and their depictions from antiquity to modernity. The book considers the figure of the foreign woman, her exile, fratricide, and infanticide, in its ancient Greek form and in global, postcolonial receptions in a range of media, including drama, film, novels, and the visual arts. The chapters illuminate the contradictions of considering the classical Medea as a central reference point for analysis of other female figures from peripheral territories, while simultaneously acknowledging the insights that such comparisons can yield. Emphasizing the ways in which Medea’s seditious nature enables the establishment of an extensive and heterogeneous intertextual network with other mythic characters who represent a similarly disruptive role in their specific local historical and cultural contexts, the book argues for a comparative analysis that is equally attentive to myths and folk tales from all regions. These essays – by scholars of classics, comparative and world literatures, and postcolonial studies – represent a plurality of perspectives from different academic contexts in Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe and examine how different cultures have depicted women, foreigners, crime, and abjection. The foundations of Greek myth and subsequently of the classical tradition itself are interrogated from a postcolonial perspective. In tracing the portrayals of Medea and other mythic women through the overlapping features of different female characters and plots, and intertwining local cultural and literary materials with broader debates, this volume challenges Eurocentric narratives of power and cultural domination, and works to decentralize the discussion of Medea from the exclusive domain of classical studies. Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts will be of interest to students and scholars working on Greek tragedy and its reception, as well as tomthose studying postcolonial and global approaches to literature, culture, and gender studies.

Medea's Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts

Medea's Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts
Author: Ana Filipa Prata
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781032261119

"This interdisciplinary volume explores the ancient Greek myth of Medea and its global analogues found in other mythic and folk tales of deadly, exiled women, such as those of La Malinche and La Llorona, examining the connections between these figures and their depictions from antiquity to modernity. The book considers the figure of the foreign woman, her exile, fratricide, and infanticide, in its ancient Greek form and in global, postcolonial receptions in a range of media, including drama, film, novels, and the visual arts. The chapters illuminate the contradictions of considering the classical Medea as a central reference point for analysis of other female figures from peripheral territories, while simultaneously acknowledging the insights that such comparisons can yield. Emphasizing the ways in which Medea's seditious nature enables the establishment of an extensive and heterogeneous intertextual network with other mythic characters who represent a similarly disruptive role in their specific local historical and cultural contexts, the book argues for a comparative analysis that is equally attentive to myths and folk tales from all regions. These essays -by scholars of Classics, Comparative and World Literatures, and postcolonial studies - represent a plurality of perspectives from different academic contexts in Africa, Latin America, North America, and Europe and examine how different cultures have depicted women, foreigners, crime, and abjection. The foundations of Greek myth, and subsequently of the classical tradition itself, are interrogated from a postcolonial perspective. In tracing the portrayals of Medea and other mythic women through the overlapping features of different female characters and plots, and intertwining local cultural and literary materials with broader debates, this volume challenges Eurocentric narratives of power and cultural domination, and works to decentralize the discussion of Medea from the exclusive domain of classical studies. Medea's Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts will be of interest to students and scholars working on Greek tragedy and its reception, as well as those studying postcolonial and global approaches to literature, culture, and gender studies"--

Encounters with the Posthuman and the Environment

Encounters with the Posthuman and the Environment
Author: Inci Bilgin Tekin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-10-29
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 166697188X

With the advent of posthumanism, many scholars in the humanities have started to explore a transforming conception of the “human,” recognizing the limits of “anthropocentricism” both within and between disciplines. Posthumanism may be defined in various ways but the emphasis in this volume is on the idea of constitutive alterity, not simply in the relationship between human beings and other human beings, but in that between human beings and other species and life forms, and between human beings, nature and technology. As a result, Encounters with the Posthuman and the Environment is located at a crossover between posthumanism and environmental humanities. Between them they move not only between disciplines but also between levels of abstraction, from the most general reflection to the most everyday empirical detail. At the same time, all the chapters are case studies, whether they address particular aspects of philosophical or scientific posthumanism, analyze particular pieces of film, theatre, art, literature, or recall for us instructive episodes from social history. The aim at any rate is to give a feel for the range and depth of the posthumanist problematic within the wider context of environmental humanities.

Greek Mythic Heroines in Brazilian Literature and Performance

Greek Mythic Heroines in Brazilian Literature and Performance
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 663
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004678476

This volume presents a survey of the reception of Greek myths - including Antigone, Medea, the Trojan cycle, and Alcestis - in Brazilian literature and stage performance. The collection addresses the work of many innovative authors, some of them great names of Brazilian literature, such as Jorge Andrade and Nelson Rodrigues, who are influential in this specific area of classical reception and well known by modern audiences. This unique volume is the product of collaboration of many scholars with different affiliations under the coordination of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte), two of the most prestigious universities in Brazil for the study of Classical and Reception Studies.

The Post-colonial Studies Reader

The Post-colonial Studies Reader
Author: Bill Ashcroft
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 618
Release: 2006
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780415345651

Boasting new extracts from major works in the field, as well as an impressive list of contributors, this second edition of a bestselling Reader is an invaluable introduction to the most seminal texts in post-colonial theory and criticism.

The Art of Contact

The Art of Contact
Author: S. Rebecca Martin
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-05-19
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0812249089

The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be, their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. Becky Martin reconsiders works of art produced by, or thought to be produced by, Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium B.C., when they were in prolonged contact with one another. Although primordial narratives that emphasize an essential quality of Greek and Phoenician identities have been critiqued for decades, Martin contends that the study of ancient history has not yet effectively challenged the idea of the inevitability of the political and cultural triumph of Greece. She aims to show how the methods used to study ancient history shape perceptions of it and argues that art is especially positioned to revise conventional accountings of the history of Greek-Phoenician interaction. Examining Athenian and Tyrian coins, kouros statues and wall mosaics, as well as the familiar Alexander Sarcophagus and the sculpture known as the "Slipper Slapper, " Martin questions what constituted "Greek" and "Phoenician" art and, by extension, Greek and Phoenician identity.

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature

Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature
Author: Ato Quayson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2021-01-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108924956

This book examines tragedy and tragic philosophy from the Greeks through Shakespeare to the present day. It explores key themes in the links between suffering and ethics through postcolonial literature. Ato Quayson reconceives how we think of World literature under the singular and fertile rubric of tragedy. He draws from many key works – Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Medea, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear – to establish the main contours of tragedy. Quayson uses Shakespeare's Othello, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Tayeb Salih, Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Samuel Beckett and J.M. Coetzee to qualify and expand the purview and terms by which Western tragedy has long been understood. Drawing on key texts such as The Poetics and The Nicomachean Ethics, and augmenting them with Frantz Fanon and the Akan concept of musuo (taboo), Quayson formulates a supple, insightful new theory of ethical choice and the impediments against it. This is a major book from a leading critic in literary studies.

Postcoloniality

Postcoloniality
Author: Margaret A. Majumdar
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2007
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845452520

Postcolonial theory is one of the key issues of scholarly debates worldwide; debates, so the author argues, which are rather sterile and characterized by a repetitive reworking of old hackneyed issues, focussing on cultural questions of language and identity in particular. She explores the divergent responses to the debates on globalization.

The Bacchae of Euripides

The Bacchae of Euripides
Author: Wole Soyinka
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1974
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780393325836

A wholly fresh interpretation of the timeless play by a Nobel Prize-winning author.

Women and the Colonial State

Women and the Colonial State
Author: Elsbeth Locher-Scholten
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2000
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9789053564035

Woman and the Colonial State deals with the ambiguous relationship between women of both the European and the Indonesian population and the colonial state in the former Netherlands Indies in the first half of the twentieth century. Based on new data from a variety of sources: colonial archives, journals, household manuals, children's literature, and press surveys, it analyses the women-state relationship by presenting five empirical studies on subjects, in which women figured prominently at the time: Indonesian labour, Indonesian servants in colonial homes, Dutch colonial fashion and food, the feminist struggle for the vote and the intense debate about monogamy of and by women at the end of the 1930s. An introductory essay combines the outcomes of the case studies and relates those to debates about Orientalism, the construction of whiteness, and to questions of modernity and the colonial state formation.