Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds

Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism and then a rich field for creating cultural identities that blend the old and the new. Nobel prize-winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by international scholars, who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.

Lorna Hardwick: Introduction; 1. Case Studies; Felix Budelmann: Trojan Women in Yorubaland: Femi Osofisan's Women of Owu; Barbara Goff: Antigone's Boat: The Colonial and the Post-colonial in Tegonni: An African Antigone, by Femi Osofisan; James Gibbs: Antigone and her African Sisters: West African Versions of a Greek Original; John Djisenu: Cross-Cultural Bonds Between Ancient Greece and Africa: Implications for Contemporary Staging Practices; Michael Simpson: The Curse of the Canon: Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not to Blame; Elke Steinmeyer: Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise; Jessie Maritz: Sculpture at Heroes' Acre, Harare, Zimbabwe: Classical Influences?; 2. Encounter and New Traditions; Richard Evans: Perspectives on Post-Colonialism in South Africa: The Voortrekker Monument's Classical Heritage; Katharine Burkitt: Imperial Reflections: The Post-Colonial Verse-Novel as Post-Epic; Cashman Kerr Prince: A Divided Child, or Derek Walcott's Post-Colonial Philology; Emily Greenwood: Arriving Backwards: The Return of The Odyssey in the English-Speaking Caribbean; Rush Rehm: `If you are a woman': Theatrical Wominizing in Sophocles' Antigone and Fugard, Kani, and Ntshona's The Island; Stephen E. Wilmer: Finding a Post-colonial Voice for Antigone: Seamus Heaney's Burial at Thebes; 3. Challenging Theory: Framing Further Questions; Freddy Decreus: `The same kind of smile': About the `Use and Abuse' of Theory in Constructing the Classical Tradition; Michiel Leezenberg: From the Peloponnesian War to the Iraq War: A Post-Liberal Reading of Greek Tragedy; Harish Trivedi: Western Classics, Indian Classics: Postcolonial Contestations; Lorna Hardwick: Shades of Multilingualism and Multivocalism in Modern Performances of Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial Contexts; Ika Willis: The Empire Never Ended; David Richards: Another Architecture