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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129518
Description
Title
Embodying the Americas through Antigone and Medea
Author(s)
Casey, Mary Selakovich
Issue Date
2025-04-10
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Calderwood, Eric
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Calderwood, Eric
Committee Member(s)
Barnard, John
Ledesma, Eduardo
Tzanetou, Angeliki
Department of Study
Comparative & World Literature
Discipline
Comparative Literature
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Latin America
US–Mexico border
classical reception
neoliberalism
authoritarianism
postcolonialism
Abstract
This dissertation traces adaptations of the Greek tragedies Antigone and Medea across the American hemisphere, spanning two hundred years of cultural production stretching from the Southern Cone to Canada. By beginning with a history of the Antigone and Medea’s prolific circulation across Latin America, this research situates hemispheric injustices spanning over five hundred years in the context of a longstanding cultural tradition in order to understand the prevalence and pervasiveness of such injustices across time and space. By anchoring this hemispheric study in the Latin American trajectory of Antigone and Medea, the U.S. and Canadian adaptations become part of a broader trend that can be better understood through this contextualization. Following this diachronic study, this dissertation turns to three particular social injustices plaguing the contemporary neoliberal state across the entire American hemisphere: immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment, racial and gender violence and the state’s culpability and complicity in such violence, and women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. Antigone and Medea tell different stories under each of these categories, but both have been called upon across time and space as empowered figures of resistance.
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