Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts, edited by Ana Filipa Prata and Rodrigo Verano, Routledge, 2024
Few figures and myths from the Greek classical antiquity resonate as powerfully as Medea with the tensions and contradictions of the modern era. In times marked by large-scale migrations and crises challenging the trajectory of civilization and the unwavering belief in progress, the legend of the granddaughter of the Sun—forever a foreigner, belonging nowhere, both betrayer and betrayed, mother and murderer—seems to wander through the liquid landscapes and vast borderlands of our contemporary world. Her long shadow continues to seep through the fissures of hegemonic narratives, offering glimpses of cyclical acts of resistance and strangeness.
The recent publication Medea’s Long Shadow in Postcolonial Contexts (edited by Ana Filipa Prata and Rodrigo Verano, Routledge, 2024) follows in the footsteps of the tragic heroine into the conflictive territories of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and visual arts, and aims to discuss the conditions in which Medea stubbornly reappears wherever political, cultural, or geographical centres and peripheries intersect, clash, and contaminate one another.
The diverse works considered in the volume are discussed from a comparatist perspective that examines their corelation with the Greek myth of Medea, privileging the study of rewritings, but also looking for intertextualities and resonances that summon the heterogeneous presence of the ancient Colchian sorceress in different postcolonial texts and contexts. This collection of essays aims to emphasise the everlasting return of the narrative on the barbarian, the foreigner, the woman, the Other who unsettles the certainties underpinning the capitalist and patriarchal structures that sustain democracy, as well as the construction of old and reminiscent colonial systems in Europe, Africa and America. The outlined proposal follows an archipelagic understanding of a character adrift throughout history, standing against the expropriation of subaltern identities, as well as the reproduction of symbolic, cultural, and discursive hierarchies; it also invites us to critically question the ways in which the classics are read and transformed in new and sometimes unexpected contexts. The book is structured to acknowledge Medea’s performative actions and journeys, highlighting the nomadic status of the tragic figure as a manifestation of her empowerment and her pursuit of agency.
Part 1, Reshaping Identities and Geographies, examines how Medea challenges imperial, capitalist and patriarchal imaginaries, while reshaping territories, identities and representations. This section combines postcolonial and feminist perspectives with post-Marxist critique, providing tools and concepts to assess the dynamics of production and reproduction against which Medea stands out. The different chapters propose new interpretations of canonical works such as Pasolini’s Medea, Maryse Condé’s Moi, Salem’s Tituba Sorcière Noire and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, highlighting different features of the Medea myth, and shed light on books by less well-known authors such as Mozambican Paulina Chiziane and the chicana Cherríe Moraga, discussing the close relationship between motherhood and nation-building issues.
Part 2, Performing Transgression at the Borders, explores Medea’s journey and adaptations in theatre across a range of historical-geographical areas and boundaries, from colonial and postcolonial Mexico to the United States, and from present-day Scotland and Turkey to nineteenth-century Yorubaland in Africa. In each environment, the perception of her agency as a form of transgression and resistance remains constant. Her troubling presence and ambivalent identity, already existing in Euripides and Seneca, disturb the regular order of things creating dissonance and engaging with cultural difference. The essays in this section survey the multiple intertextual relations that emerge and connect the classical Medea with characters such as La Malinche, the goddess Coatlicue, Medaaye or Mediha, questioning its limits and possibilities, while unveiling her ghostly and foreign identity. Also, these chapters deal directly with conflict situations and contexts of creation of national identities within the framework of both colonization and decolonization processes in Latin America, Africa, and Europe. Additionally, they explore how, in an omni-local framework, classical tradition dialogues with contemporary dramatic texts drawing on the multiple possibilities and directions of reception.
Part 3, Disseminating Reception, Reproduction and Waste, discusses the dissemination of Medea’s myth in literature, history, cinema and plastic arts, and examines the archetypal and iconic dimension of the Greek character, revealing how it can be used as a lens to read different and distant contexts. These chapters propose a “variations on a theme” emphasis that retrieves Medea’s subversive nature to weave a network with alike female figures such as Penelope, Circe, Helen of Troy, the brujas, hechiceras and yerbateras of the New Kingdom of Granada, the French geologist Medée in Bessora’s Petroleum, or the murderous mother Alicia in the film Satanás, by Andrés Baiz. The chapters of this section draw on the reception of Medea and how it challenges systemic patriarchal, colonial and capitalist violence that ensure the reproduction of narratives and aesthetical proposals, highlighting her poisonous and deadly role that discontinues the cycles of reproduction. These last essays seek an explanation for her actions as sorceress, as a mother who kills, and as an icon that resists representation, and connect Medea’s monstrosity with the condition of waste, as a product used and disposed of by colonialism. This section engages critically with the problem of the various versions of the myth and questions the established traditional narrative according to which Medea would have killed her children out of spite or jealousy. The chapters draw instead on the persecutions and the oppression exerted on the character that explain infanticide as the only possible form of rebellion.
Throughout the various sections of the volume, Medea is discussed in its multiple forms and under different names that stress her persistent presence and autonomy in discourse while weaving an extensive intertextual web that feeds her so-called anti-human and phantasmagorical nature. Within this rhizomatic reception, the metamorphotic power she has to transform waste into a tool of self-determination becomes manifest. Also, as a disruptive and transgressive force, she emerges within a network of kinships and discontinuities that point to new ways of narrating beyond tradition, as well as new forms of life. Ultimately, Medea personifies a kind of an Atlantic itinerancy that both enables and contradicts the currents of influence in power and discourse and the ways these (re)signify territories and cultures.