Medea/Media: a glitchy counterfactual

Abstract

James Ijames, the winner of a 2022 Pulitzer prize for Fat Ham, loosely based on Hamlet, has just presented a new realization of Medea, Media/Medea, which had its world premiere at Bryn Mawr College and the Community College of Philadelphia in April 2023. This article provides a reading of it, addressing the themes of irony, queer ‘authenticity’, acting, and mothering through the framing of the ‘glitchy counterfactual’ — a conceit we borrow from Legacy Russell’s manifesto for a new Black cyberfeminism to approach the most blatant innovation in Ijames’s version, the unfulfilled infanticide. This astonishing change in the script, which tightly connects Medea with her onomastic negativity and queer unbecoming, urges us to reflect upon survival and survivance in an anti-Black world; it might yield a reckoning in line with Kevin Quashie’s notion of ‘subjunctivity’, Black ‘aliveness’.