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The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy: 165
Author(s): Astrid Van Weyenberg (Author)
- Publisher: Editions Rodopi B.V.
- Publication Date: 1 Jan. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 267 pages
- ISBN-10: 9042037008
- ISBN-13: 9789042037007
Book Description
The opening chapters focus on plays that mobilize Greek tragedy to inspire political change, discussing how Sophocles’ heroine Antigone is reconfigured as a freedom fighter and how Euripides’ Dionysos is transformed into a revolutionary leader.
The later chapters shift the focus to plays that explore the costs and consequences of political change, examining how the cycle of violence dramatized in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy acquires relevance in post-apartheid South Africa, and how the mourning of Euripides’ Trojan Women resonates in and beyond Nigeria.
Throughout, the emphasis is on how playwrights, through adaptation, perform a cultural politics directed at the Europe that has traditionally considered ancient Greece as its property, foundation, and legitimization. Van Weyenberg additionally discusses how contemporary African reworkings of Greek tragedies invite us to reconsider how we think about the genre of tragedy and about the cultural process of adaptation.
Against George Steiner’s famous claim that tragedy has died, this book demonstrates that Greek tragedy holds relevance today. But it also reveals that adaptations do more than simply keeping the texts they draw on alive: through adaptation, playwrights open up a space for politics. In this dynamic between adaptation and pre-text, the politics of adaptation is performed.
Editorial Reviews
Review
K.J. Wetmore, Jr., Acta Classica LVIII (2015)
Alert to dangers of self-mythologizing in both European and African contexts,
The Politics of Adaptation asks not only how tragedy has been used in the past, but how it might be employed in future, and whether our ongoing engagement with the genre might be changing the very nature of ‘tragedy’.Stephe Harrop, New Theatre Quarterly, 31-1 (2015)
… an important contribution to the field of adaptation studies. [Van Weyenberg’s] book should interest and challenge scholars in a variety of fields beyond adaptation studies, including postcolonialism, classics, and tragedy (given her interest in how African dramatists adapt and rework the genre).
Phillip Zapkin,
About the Author
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