In referencing Rena Fraden’s 2001 Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theatre for Incarcerated Women and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.’s 2013 Black Medea: Adaptations in Modern Plays, I suggest that transposing Euripides’s myth into modern black contexts often endows ancient Greek drama with epistemological primacy, whether seeking the “universal” redemption it has long exemplified, or resisting that primacy through the return to a “past” or “heritage” foreclosed by the catastrophe of racial slavery. My critique is not of the substance of the works these two books showcase, all of which constitute important contributions to theater activism. Rather, I aim to expose the transpositional limits of the figure of Medea, whose racial marking (to which I suggest Euripides hints, whether consciously or not), while signifying as stranger/outsider, is often obscured by a gendered, geographical and/or existential “othering,” rather than recognized as a plight of ontological proportion. As such, a blackened Medea can appear to possess the (structural) capacity afforded by her godly, supra-subject position. But what are the incalculable depths of her subjection and dishonor when her blackening pitches her “being” into an ontological dilemma that neither catharsis, nor the intervention of a deus ex machina can recuperate?
Medea’s (Black) Cast:On Dishonor and the Limits of Freedom Dreams, God’s Machines and Narrative Transposition
Jaye Austin Williams is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Critical Black Studies at Bucknell University. Her work examines antiblackness, its circulation through cinema and drama, and its analysis in the work of Black dramatists and filmmakers. Having spent thirty years as an acclaimed stage director, playwright, actor, and consultant on and off Broadway and regionally, she holds an MFA from NYU and a PhD with a critical theory emphasis from the UC Irvine/ UC San Diego joint doctoral program in Drama and Theatre. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Staging (Within) Violence: Toward a Radical Black Dramaturgy.
Jaye Austin Williams; Medea’s (Black) Cast:On Dishonor and the Limits of Freedom Dreams, God’s Machines and Narrative Transposition. Pacific Coast Philology 1 April 2021; 56 (1): 7–26. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/pacicoasphil.56.1.0007
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