Antígonas A Latin American Tradition

Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is the first book in the English language to approach classical reception through the study of one classical fragment as it circulates throughout Latin America. This interdisciplinary research engages comparative literature, Latin American studies, classical reception, history, feminist theory, political philosophy, and theatre history. Moira Fradinger tracks the ways in which, since the early nineteenth century, fragments of Antigone's myth and tragedy have been persistently cannibalized and ruminated throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, quilted to local dramatic forms, revealing an archive of political thought about Latin America's heterogeneous neo-colonial histories. Antígona is consistently characterized as a national mother and, as the twentieth century advances, multiplied on stage, forming female collectives, foregrounding the urgency of systemic change or staging gender politics. Through meticulous examination of classical culture in necolonial contexts, Fradinger explores ways of reading Creole texts from the geopolitical South that disrupt the colonial reading protocols that deracinate texts or lock them into locality. By historicizing Antígona plays and interpreting them with a purpose to address specific colonial legacies, the book reveals how Antígona has ceased being Greek and instead tells stories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin America. Antígonas rethinks the paradigms through which we understand the presence of ancient cultural materials in former colonial territories, while illuminating an understudied continent in Anglophone reception studies.

Moira Fradinger, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Yale University

Moira Fradinger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She works on South American, Caribbean and European fiction and film; Anti-colonial and decolonial thought; classics in Latin America and the Caribbean; psychoanalytic theory, and gender studies. Fradinger recently translated six 20th-century Latin American vernacular Antígona plays into English.

Introduction
Our América, Our Antígona
Ouverture
Juan Cruz Varela's 1824 Argia: Antigone's Death, Antígona's Birth
1. Leopoldo Marechal's 1951 Antígona Vélez: 'To govern is to populate'
2. Félix Morisseau-Leroy's 1953 Vodou Antigòn an Kreyòl: For the People, By the People, With the People
3. Jorge Andrade's 1967 Pedreira das almas and 1969 As Confrarias: Brazil's Exposed Corpses
4. One Hundred Years of Puerto Rican Solitude: Luis Rafael Sánchez's 1968 Antígona Pérez
5. By Way of Interlude: The Dynamics of The Corpus In Lesser-Known Plays: Mid-Century Innovations
6. Griselda Gambaro's 1986 Antígona Furiosa: The Incorruptible
7. Yuyachkani's and Watanabe's Peruvian Ismene: Revolutionary Shame in the Year 2000
Conclusion
We Are All Antígonas on the 21st-Century Stage
Bibliography
Index