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.

"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"--

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.

Provides a deeply researched account of contemporary Asian art movements, focusing on the work of a select group of internationally renowned and politically engaged artists.

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.

After the end of Apartheid, South African theatre was characterized by a remarkable process of constant aesthetic reinvention. This multivocal volume documents some of the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these innovative stage idioms.

Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is given to postcolonial works within their cultural field using both literary-critical and sociological methods of analysis.

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.

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.

This monograph is the first to identify an important theoretical overlap between Anglo-Saxon and Lusophone postcolonial theories: the systematic neglect of gender and sexual variables in the analysis of the marketing of cultural difference in the post colonial era. Drawing on the theoretical work of Graham Huggan and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the author of this study discusses the political significance of this neglect by focusing on the asymmetrical positions occupied by two widely acclaimed Lusophone women writers, Paulina Chiziane of Mozambique and Lídia Jorge of Portugal. The book asks how these two contemporary writers deal with master narratives such as Lusofonia, exoticism, capitalism and post colonialism in their novels, and examines the implications of placing gender and sexual difference at the heart of the 'post colonial exotic'.