Medea the Refugee

Kasimis, Demetra

doi:10.1017/s0034670520000376

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…In so doing, I join scholars such as Demetra Kasimis and Elizabeth Markovits, whose analyses establish the richness of this text as a resource for political thinking. 27 While their readings illustrate the political-theoretical potential of Medea, neither attends specifically to the political ramifications of the emotions that perform critical work within the play.…”

Section: Political Emotions: An Affective Reading Of Medeamentioning

confidence: 99%

Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss

Hanley¹

2022

Theory & Event

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Loss is a defining condition of the contemporary moment. This essay theorizes grief and rage as co-constitutive emotional responses to loss often staged in tragic plays. Using Sara Ahmed's work to read Euripides' Medea affectively, I demonstrate how their affinity can provoke affective solidarity arising from the circulation of these emotions. This article constructs an account of the feminist choreography of affective solidarity that can sustain political responses to loss. Placing Medea in conversation with Black feminist thinkers such as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman, I emphasize the way grief and rage can help overcome obstacles like division, powerlessness, and marginalization, which link Medea's plight to those addressed by these thinkers, and chart a new political course. While loss is indeed devastating, engaging Medea through the lens of affective solidarity is instructive as to the generative potential and collective configurations in its wake that we can choreograph into being.

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Section: Political Emotions: An Affective Reading Of Medeamentioning

confidence: 99%

Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss

Hanley¹

2022

Theory & Event

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“…Electra criticism typically translates phygas as ‘exile’, though I generally refrain from using this or any translation of the term so as to capture the play of meanings alive in the Greek and which Electra's speech is bringing to mind. For a reading of Euripides’ Medea as a meditation on becoming a phygas , see Kasimis (2020).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The appendix offers a comprehensive list of wandering women in tragedy. They include Io in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound ; the Erinyes in his Eumenides ; the Danaids (as a group) in his Suppliants ; Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris ; Helen in Euipides’ Helen ; and, I would add, Euripides’ Medea (Kasimis [2020]). As I argue here, however, Electra, in contrast to Orestes, does not wander but nevertheless sees herself as a phygas.…”

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confidence: 99%

Electra Lost in Transit

Kasimis¹

2021

Ramus

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Like all the tragedies about the House of Atreus, Euripides’ Electra dramatizes the political stakes of familial disorder. In the background lies the legendary story of Agamemnon who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia and, after returning from Troy, was killed by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. Electra takes place sometime after that murder and political usurpation, with the couple scrambling to secure their rule against the potential threat of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's children. When the play opens, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus have already exiled Orestes from Argos and relocated Electra to its border where she lives in a forced countryside marriage to a poor farmer. Over the course of the play, the siblings reunite and plot the murders of their mother and her new husband. By its end, Orestes and Electra are prepared to say goodbye to each other for good and, under the stain of matricide, to embark on their respective forms of movement, wandering for him and a new marriage for her.

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Indigenous Medea: space, time, and resistance in Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea

Kearns

2023

Classical Receptions Journal

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In Wesley Enoch’s 2000 play Black Medea, Seneca’s Medea is reworked for settler-colonial Australia: Enoch’s Medea is an Indigenous woman from an unnamed Land who falls in love with Jason, an Indigenous man from the city with ambitions to succeed by settler-colonial standards. Against the will of her family, Medea reveals to Jason the natural resources lying underneath her Land and allows him to overturn the sacred earth in pursuit of profit for a Western corporation. The tragedy chronicles the subsequent demise of Jason and Medea’s relationship in the settler city and Medea’s filicidal retaliation for Jason’s crimes. Despite the radically different setting of Black Medea from its Roman antecedent, the two plays share numerous thematic concerns as well as several key moments in which the Senecan text is quoted verbatim. This essay contends that in Black Medea, Enoch apprehends topoi of displacement and temporal normativity from Seneca’s Medea and mobilizes them to elucidate the conditions of Indigenous Australians under settler colonialism. By doing so, he offers critical insight towards the use of Indigeneity as an analytic for Medea myths ancient and modern.

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Medea the Refugee

Cited by 6 publications

References 22 publications

Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss

Choreographing Affective Solidarity: The Choral Politics of Responding to Loss

Electra Lost in Transit

Indigenous Medea: space, time, and resistance in Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea

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