Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, and: Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (review)

Although addressed primarily to classicists, Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds and Crossroads in the Black Aegean make important contributions to theatre studies as the latest in a series of books that identify and analyze the revisioning of classical Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, among them Dionysus Since ’69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium; Medea in Performance, 1500–2000; Agamemnon in Performance, 458 BC to AD 2004; and Classics and Colonialism. The latter books deal primarily with the reception of Greek drama in the West, but as is becoming clear from such new studies as Staging of Ancient Drama around 2000 (which focuses primarily on Eastern European remakings of Greek plays, but includes productions in Turkey, Egypt, Australia, and Japan) and the forthcoming Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (which analyzes remakings of Antigone all around the world), the use of classical Greek tragedy to address current political and social issues has become a worldwide phenomenon. The two books under review here are the first to focus on the remaking of Greek drama in a postcolonial framework.

The scope of these books might seem to imply that classical Greek drama is universal. In fact, however, they celebrate the remaking of Greek classics not as an example of “universal high Western culture,” but as a group of plays that now belong to numerous “other” cultures. As Goff and Simpson write, this shifts the “emphasis from the achieved state of these plays as ‘liberated’ to the work of the adaptations in making them so” (57). The productions discussed here seem to honor Greek tragedy while simultaneously undermining or dismantling aspects of the cultural hegemony Greek drama can represent, particularly in places such as Ghana and Nigeria, where Greek tragedy and, by extension, Greek culture have been used to justify the colonial project or to prove colonial cultural superiority. Both books pay significant attention to how adaptation can be more of a challenge to the “original” than a derivative of it. What better way to challenge colonialism (either before, during, or after the “official” period of colonization) than by using the very tools that colonial powers used to justify their cultural superiority and therefore their dominance?

In Crossroads in the Black Aegean, Goff and Simpson use adaptations of Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone in Africa and the African diaspora to track ways in which culture is transmitted from one generation to the next, and from one location to another. Each chapter focuses on a particular play: Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth, Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus, Kamau Brathwaite’s Odale’s Choice, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island, and Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone. Considering how these plays are consciously different from their Greek originals, Goff and Simpson frame these differences as political, arguing that the adaptations “question the scope and authority of [European] literary standards, and ultimately . . . demonstrate an alternative beyond the polarity of the oral and the literary on which those standards depend” (24). Goff and Simpson also consider how these new plays help to articulate and define new cultures by performing their differences from the originals. Furthermore, while many of the plays covered in their book as well as in Hardwick and Gillespie’s Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds have achieved their own canonical status, Goff and Simpson point out that “[r]ather than seeking either to join and thus change the canon . . . or, at the other extreme, to repudiate any notion of a canon, these plays all resist the canon’s own model of cultural relationships and in some cases . . . propose...