Meet our African takeover team members!
Prof. Mark Fleishman, Mandla Mbothwe and Jayne Batzofin, from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, are working on the exciting project entitled Reimagining Tragedy in Africa and the Global South (ReTAGS). The ReTAGS project proposes to take a concept – tragedy – from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation and to reimagine it from a perspective in Africa that is directed at the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and towards our possible futures both inside and outside of the discipline.
The project aims to understand how tragedy has been refigured in the postcolonial theatre; how moments of tragic excess are enacted outside of the theatre in the course of revolts against neo-colonial establishments and forces; and, in an embodied, performative manner, how tragedy might be utilised as a tool for understanding the present regime of time and its performative effects in the global neo-colonial complex that characterises the world as it is emerging now across all hemispheres.
The ReTAGS research is driven by a team of dedicated and passionate academics, theatre practitioners as well as post graduate students. We would like to briefly introduce you to three of them, who will be actively involved in contributing towards the CSRN blog. Prof. Mark Fleishman, is the Primary Investigator on the project. He is Co-Artistic Director of Magnet Theatre, and Professor of Theatre at the Centre for Theatre Dance and Performance Studies (CTDPS) at the University of Cape Town. He teaches across a range of theoretical and practical courses with a specific focus on theatre-making and dramaturgy. He has directed multiple productions over the past 30 plus years all over the world, including a number of adapted versions of ancient tragedies.
Mandla Mbothwe is the Co-Investigator on the project. He is also Co-Artistic Director of Magnet Theatre and Senior Lecturer at the CTDPS. He has created theatre productions of high quality, in South Africa and abroad, dealing with cultural and historical themes, predominantly in isiXhosa. Jayne Batzofin, heads up the documenting and digital archiving of the research, responsible for bridging the space between the Digital Archive and the Performing Arts. They are known for their strong directorial vision and advocacy in Theatre for Early Years and Theatre for Youth, specialising in inclusivity and accessibility.
Mrs Gifty Etornam Katahena is an academic in the Department of Philosophy and Classics, Classics Section, University of Ghana, Legon. She is in the process of finishing her PhD and an assistant lecturer in the department. Her areas of specialization include but are not limited to the reception of classical literature in Africa, gender-related issues in ancient Greece and Rome, and mythology. Her current PhD project involves the reception of classical tragedy: Sophocles’ Antigone and the Politics of Adaptation in Post-colonial Rewritings. She is also the acting vice-president of the Classical Association of Ghana (CAG) and co-organiser for the 2nd International Classics Conference in Ghana themed, Global Classics and Africa: Past, Present and Future, which has been rescheduled to be held in October 2021, due to the COVID pandemic.
Dr Samantha Masters is an academic in the Ancient Studies Department at Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa. She is involved in teaching ancient cultures and research in ancient Greek and Roman material culture and the reception of the classics in South Africa. Apart from research related to Attic vase-painting, another key project is The South African Classical Antiquities (SACA) Database Project. This is a megadatabase of all classical artefacts in South African museum collections. The database is both a repository of information about the objects in the collections, but also a study of the histories of the collections themselves; i.e. their reception. Other key areas of research include the place of classics in contemporary South Africa. She is co-editor of the book Africa, Greece, Rome: Decolonising Classics, forthcoming 2021, and is also working on the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary South African sculpture.
Prof. Olakunbi Olasope is an academic at the Department of Classics, University of Ibadan in Nigeria. She works on the reception of Greek and Roman theatre in West African drama, and in particular, the work of Femi Osofisan, on which she is an authority. Her work draws on comparisons between Yoruba culture and ancient Roman social practices and she is a recognised expert on gender and social history and the reception of classical literature in modern Nigerian drama and literature.
Like the rest of the world, many of us are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic which makes for an exceptional year and difficult circumstances in the academic world, as well as the theatrical environment. However, the work continues, despite the challenges. We invite students, scholars and practitioners working on the reception of classical antiquity in Africa to contact the African takeover co-ordinator, Dr Samantha Masters, if you would like to participate in the blog. Please email masters@sun.ac.za. We would love to hear about your work in general and how you are managing to work during this pandemic. We hope that this blog takeover may kickstart a classical reception network on our continent and lead to future collaboration in a number of ways.
>>Top image: M&M Homer (reception of a bust of Homer in the Louvre) by Ané Lategan, Stellenbosch University, May 2014. Photograph taken by Samantha Masters.