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Sophocles' Antigone has been staged all over the world, and many of these productions have reconceived and remade the play to address local issues and concerns. This collection of essays explores the play's reception in numerous countries, as diverse as The Congo and Australia, Argentina and Japan.
This book explores the enduring myth of Antigone, constantly rediscovered and relevant across centuries. It examines how myth influences collective consciousness and is kept alive through rituals. Antigone’s marginal position, created by the exclusion of Polynices from the death ritual, is analyzed using the concept of liminality developed by Van Gennep and Turner. The process of people on the threshold, likened to being in the womb by Turner, is explained through Kristeva’s ideas of subjectivity, chora, abject, and poetic language, as well as the thoughts of Guattari and Levinas. It shows how subjectivity can be constructed as singularity in moments of crisis. The book also discusses how Antigone, a founding myth of Western thought, is reconstructed in the work of Kamila Shamsie. Her rewriting of Antigone, through the character of Aneeka, a Muslim Urdu-British woman, demonstrates Antigone’s timeless power of resistance. Both Antigone and Aneeka validate Guattari’s view that subjectivity can be individualized through social and semiological ties, positioning themselves in relation to otherness, family habits, local customs, and judicial laws.
Despite feminism’s uneven movements, it has been predominantly understood through metaphors of generations or waves. Feminism's Queer Temporalities builds on critiques of the limitations of this linear model to explore alternative ways of imagining feminism’s timing. It finds in feminism’s literary and cultural archive narratives of temporality that might now be diagnosed as queer, where queer designates modes of being historical that exceed the linear and the generational. Few theorists have looked to popular feminist figures, literature, and culture to theorize feminism’s timing. Through methodologically creative readings, McBean explores non-generational, anti-linear, and asynchronous time in the figure of Antigone, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, the film Ladies and Gentlemen: The Fabulous Stains, Valerie Solanas and SCUM Manifesto, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. The first to substantially bring together the ways in which time has come to matter in both feminist and queer disciplines, this book will appeal to students and scholars of feminist, queer and gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies.
Sophocles's classical tragedy, Antigone, is continually reinvented, particularly in the Americas. Theater practitioners and political theorists alike revisit the story to hold states accountable for their democratic exclusions, as Antigone did in disobeying the edict of her uncle, Creon, for refusing to bury her brother, Polynices. Antigone in the Americas not only analyzes the theoretical reception of Antigone, when resituated in the Americas, but further introduces decolonial rumination as a new interpretive methodology through which to approach classical texts. Traveling between modern present and ancient past, Andrés Fabián Henao Castro focuses on metics (resident aliens) and slaves, rather than citizens, making the feminist politics of burial long associated with Antigone relevant for theorizing militant forms of mourning in the global south. Grounded in settler colonial critique, black and woman of color feminisms, and queer and trans of color critique, Antigone in the Americas offers a more radical interpretation of Antigone, one relevant to subjects situated under multiple and interlocking systems of oppression.
Sophocles' play Antigone is a starting point for understanding the problems of human societies, families, and individuals caught up in the aftermath of mass violence. Through comparison of Germany, Japan, Spain, Yugoslavia and Turkey, we begin to appreciate the different pathways that societies have taken when confronting their violent histories.
This book explores the figure of Antigone and her many reconceptualizations from antiquity to the present. One of the most popular heroines of classical literature, Antigone defied political authority to carry out the forbidden burial of her brother. Readers will become familiar with the key themes of Antigone’s story, such as the law and politics, gender, and death, tracing their survival and transformations over time. Notably, the book explores the thorough de-politicization of the heroine in philosophy and psychoanalysis, followed by a reversal and re-politicization through feminist and socio-political theories. It provides a useful tool to approach postmodern receptions of Antigone in ...
It is not Egypt's 2011 revolution that opened a space for women's and feminist activism, but--as this book shows--the long history of women's activism that created the intellectual and political background for revolution. By centering the experiences and ideas of multiple generations of women activists and intellectuals, Lucia Sorbera traces the feminist genealogies of Egypt's nationalist, student, Marxist, labor, human rights, and democratic social movements. Biography of a Revolution gathers a series of interrelated intimate and relational stories, charting in vivid detail the entanglements between women's aspirations across a century of politics and friendships. This historical analysis innovatively deploys decolonial and indigenous feminist epistemologies, bringing women's, gender, and feminist history into the center of Egypt's political, social, and intellectual history. More than a decade after the 2013 military coup, women's intellectual and political activism remains crucial to keeping the embers of revolution aglow.
Collective creation - the practice of collaboratively devising works of performance - rose to prominence not simply as a performance making method, but as an institutional model. By examining theatre practices in Europe and North America, this book explores collective creation's roots in the theatrical experiments of the early twentieth century.
Tragic Resistance analyzes playwrights, directors, and performers who shatter gender norms to gain agency within the patriarchal institutions restricting them. The artists in this book work against the tragic narratives that would otherwise constrict them: the tragedy of Antigone unmade by Judith Malina, the history of "The Venus Hottentot" pulled into the present in Suzan-Lori Parks's Venus, the narrative of the rape "victim" eschewed in Emma Sulkowicz's performances, the story of brides jilted by the homophobic state government in the case of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, the tragedy of Anna Nicole as told by Margaret Cho, and the reclamation of the female body from traditional hip hop by Nicki Minaj. All these performers and performances subvert traditional notions of gendered roles that people should or could hold. This book examines the nature of these performances to interrogate how theatrical and performative resistance works and why performance might be a vehicle for altering patriarchal structures that withhold agency from women and trans/genderqueer+ people.
Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture is an introductory text for students specialising in gender studies. The truly interdisciplinary and intergenerational approach bridges the gap between humanities and the social sciences, and it showcases the academic and social context in which gender studies has evolved. Complex contemporary phenomena such as globalisation, neo-liberalism and 'fundamentalism' are addressed that stir up new questions relevant to the study of culture. This vibrant and wide-ranging collection of essays is essential reading for anyone in need of an accessible but sophisticated guide to the very latest issues and concepts within gender studies. 'Doing Gender in Media, Art, and Culture' is an indispensable introduction to third wave feminism and contemporary gender studies. It is international in scope, multidisciplinary in method, and transmedial in coverage. It shows how far feminist theory has come since Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and marks out clearly how much still needs to be done.'........Hayden White, Professor of Historical Studies, Emeritus, University of California, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University, US