Crossroads Black Aegean: Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora.

Somewhat rubbed jacket, otherwise very good and clean. - Among those Greek tragedies adapted by dramatists across the African continent and diaspora, why do the plays of Sophocles' Theban cycle figure so prominently? How can plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, claim to articulate the postcolonial moment? Capitalizing on the resources of classical reception studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, Crossroads in the Black Aegean develops detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem from several locations across the African diaspora. It crucially investigates how the plays engage with the 'Western canon', and shows how they use their self-consciously literary status to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and that of the Greek originals, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission. The book also develops a new analytic concept, the 'Black Aegean', with which to theorize the ways in which colonialist and postcolonial discourses have staged various encounters between ancient Greece and contemporary Africa. This construct mediates the debates about the Black Atlantic and Black Athena through the plays. Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a theoretically astute and timely intervention in several fields, which deals with complex interdisciplinary material in an exceptionally lucid manner. It provides new theoretical apparatus within reception studies, and helps to re-balance postcolonial literary studies away from a preoccupation with pure theory, just as its dramatic and theatrical analyses help to correct an earlier over-investment in the novel. ISBN 9780199217182