[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Stemming from a workshop at the 2019 IX Jornadas Filológicas in Bogotá, Colombia, this volume introduces readers to a deadly sisterhood of Medea-figures haunting an impressive array of texts and images. Over the course of 16 chapters, contributors discuss novels, plays, films, visual artworks, and archival records, primarily from postcolonial contexts in the Americas and Africa, ranging in date from the 17th century to the 21st. This makes for a welcome addition to Routledge’s Classics and the Postcolonial series, and readers primarily familiar with Anglo-European receptions of the classics in general and Medea in particular will encounter much here that is new and important.
As the Introduction makes clear and the contributions bear out, the volume is postcolonial not just in its material but also in its theoretical and political commitments. Luminaries like Gloria Anzaldúa, Homi Bhabha, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Mignolo make repeat appearances, and the editors’ stated ambition is “to walk with Medea to a communal place of freedom and wandering to understand how she…challenges and transcends concepts of nation or state,” as well as Eurocentric narratives of power and cultural domination both within and without the discipline of classics (6). While there is no shortage of scholarship on the reception of Medea across diverse times, places, and media, this volume makes a unique contribution not only in focusing exclusively and explicitly on postcolonial Medeas but also in arguing for Medea as a critical hermeneutic for addressing postcoloniality itself.[1] As they explore her kinship with and metamorphoses into an unruly multiplicity of characters, the editors and contributing authors emphasize Medea’s embodiment of resistance: to colonial discourses of homogenization and peace; to symbolic and cultural hierarchies prioritizing the classics, their European reception, and Western delineations of what is and is not art; and to univocal versions of what she and her deadly subaltern sisters signify.
Following the editors’ introduction, the volume is divided into three sections. The first, ‘Reshaping Identities and Geographies’, explores literary and filmic variations on the Medea myth that challenge the commodification of bodies and lands and destabilize colonialist, capitalist, and patriarchal structures of power. The second section, ‘Performing Transgression at the Borders’, focuses exclusively on dramatic receptions of Medea, each of which relocates her to a specific historical-geographical setting in order to interrogate and trouble modern nationalist myth-making. The final section, ‘Disseminating Reception, Reproduction, and Waste’, draws together the most disparate collection of materials, including archival records and a work of visual art. The emphasis here is on Medea and her analogues as poisonous and deadly elements in historical and symbolic cycles of reproduction, and also on their condition as lives wasted by the systemic violence of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy. There are thus multiple lines of thematic connection between individual papers and the three sections, knitting the volume into a coherent whole that rewards reading as such. A short but serviceable index, and cross-references in chapter endnotes, assist readers in tracking discussions of central concepts, texts, and authors across the contributions.
Roughly half of the deadly sisters identified and discussed by the contributors are explicit reimaginings of the classical Medea familiar from Euripides, Apollonius Rhodius, and/or Seneca (e.g. Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea, Magaña’s Cortes y la Malinche (Los argonautas), Osofisan’s Medaaye, and so on). In other cases, however, kinship with Medea is established by the reader-scholar based on a shifting constellation of character and plot features: these include infanticide and other less extreme forms of fraught motherhood; the experience of alienation qua expatriate, colonized, and/or racialized woman; and more general markers such as witchiness, hybridity, and itineracy. This capacious approach fosters the diversity of texts and contexts considered, but in some instances ‘Medea’ comes to name experiences so nearly universal as to attenuate the kinship bonds of the volume’s deadly sisterhood. In her chapter on Ana Castillo’s So Far from God, for example, Sara Palermo makes ‘Medea’ into “a concept, something that may describe…the distress suffered by those women who are victims of men’s decisions and impositions” (155). Working from this highly general definition of Medea-hood, Palermo sees shades of the Colchian not only in the women of Castillo’s novel — which never invokes the classical Medea — but also in Circe, Penelope, Helen, and indeed “all the classical she-monsters” (155). There are moments, therefore, when one might question the heuristic value of identifying women from such a diversity of texts and contexts as types of Medea. And as the editors themselves acknowledge, there is a risk of reproducing here the colonialist practice of rendering other peoples and realities legible by assimilating them into existing Western paradigms. Happily, the contributors generally avoid this pitfall through close attention to the locality of the women within their specific contexts and sustained engagement with postcolonial critiques.
This is especially true in outstanding contributions like Rodrigo Verano’s chapter on Luis Alfaro’s 2015 play Mojada, which relocates Euripides’ Medea to the Chicanx neighbourhood of Boyle Heights, Los Angeles. Verano argues that Alfaro’s Medea comes to embody a new mestiza as theorized by Anzaldúa, and that the play as a whole enacts something like Mignolo’s concept of epistemic disobedience: it “reinscribes the classical legacy through the prism of a minority traditionally considered subaltern in relation to those who advocate that same legacy as one of their main signs of identity” (109). Verano presents his primary texts and theoretical frameworks lucidly, offers mutually illuminating close readings of passages from Euripides and Alfaro, and encompasses in his argument many of the volume’s central insights. Also impressive is Pablo Guarín Robledo’s chapter on Andrés Baiz’s Satanás, a 2005 Colombian film fictionalizing the Pozzetto Massacre of 1986. Discussing the two Medea-type women in the film, Guarín Robledo develops an original concept of the ‘ob-scene’ to consider the potentially redemptive effect of not rendering violent acts like infanticide as onstage/on-screen spectacles: as the cries of Medea’s children echo from backstage, or the camera lingers on a child’s shoe in a puddle of blood, the actual violence registers as beyond visible, triggering rather than inhibiting the audience’s reflection upon the structural and systemic conditions that produced it.
Given the number and diversity of receptions discussed, this volume will be an excellent resource for those who teach Euripides’ Medea (or Seneca’s), as so many of us do and in such a wide range of classes. The theoretical density of the chapters makes them unsuitable for all but the most advanced undergraduates. However, the volume furnishes a wealth of examples and insights one could draw on to introduce postcolonial and feminist concerns as vital to considering classical figures and their long shadows. To give but one example, a number of contributors convincingly read the infanticides committed by Medea’s postcolonial sisters as violent rebellions conditioned by and enacted against the intersecting violences of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism (Champion, Filipa Prata, Jiroutová Kynčlová, Verano). In these readings, the women are “held accountable for their children’s murders, but not for the fact that the children’s death is the most radical form of protest against patriarchal [and other forms of] dominance” (80). This is a perspective that could do much to broaden discussions of the classical Medea to include the systemic oppressions under which she lives as a foreigner and a woman.
The text is generally well-edited, and the production quality of the volume is adequate though not lavish. The chapter on Vik Muniz’s Medea about to kill her children, after Eugene Delacroix, is furnished with two black-and-white reproductions of the photograph, and there are no images accompanying Movellán Luis’ chapter on Pasolini’s Medea or Guarín Robledo’s on Baiz’s Satanás. Including stills from these films would have enriched these contributions, but the authors do compensate for the absence of visual evidence with detailed descriptions.
Scholars and instructors interested in postcolonial, global, and feminist approaches to classics and classical reception will thus find much of value in this volume. The editors and contributors are to be congratulated for assembling such a rich array of postcolonial writings to read in Medea’s shadow, and for showing how far from the Western canon we can walk in her footsteps.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Ana Filipa Prata and Rodrigo Verano)
Part 1: Reshaping Identities and Geographies
- How Medea Challenged “Western Civilization”: Europe’s Imperial Imaginary in Pasolini’s Medea (Mireia Movellán Luis)
- Archipelagic Medea: (Re)Productive Labor in Maryse Condé, Toni Morrison, and Cherrié Moraga (Giulia Champion)
- The Medea Disorder and the Writing of the Nation in Ventos do Apocalipse by Paulina Chiziane (Ana Filipa Prata)
- Curtailed Motherhoods and the Matrix of (Post)Colonialism: Chican Hybrid Prototypes (Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová)
Part 2: Performing Transgression at the Borders
- Medea-Malinche, Malinche-Medea? Identity and Transformation in Colonized Cultures (Andrea Lozano-Vásquez)
- Medea in the Borderlands: The New Mestiza in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada (Rodrigo Verano)
- Rereading Medea Across Borders — Cultural Encounters and Postcolonial Rewrites in Liz Lochhead’s Medea, Yüksel Pazarkaya’s Mediha, and Cherrié Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (İnci Bilgin Tekin)
- Medaaye: Patriarchy, Love and Exile in Nineteenth-Century Yorubaland (Olakunbi Olasope)
Part 3: Disseminating Reception, Reproduction, and Waste
- Hybridity and Alienation. Women’s Narrative in Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (Sara Palermo)
- Medea in the New Kingdom of Granada: Brujas, Hechiceras, Yerbateras (Gemma Bernardó Ferrer)
- Medea in Gabon: A Postcolonial and Autobiographical Re-telling of the Medea Myth in Bessora’s Novel Petroleum (Elke Steinmeyer)
- “Not Before the People”: Filicide, Revenge, and Ob-scenity in Andrés Baiz’s Satanás (Pablo Guarín Robledo)
- Reappropriation, Itinerancy, and Waste in Vik Muniz’s Medea (Camilo Hernández Castellanos)
Notes
[1] Recent publications on the reception of Medea include James Clauss and Sarah Johnston, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy and Art (1999); Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, and Oliver Taplin, Medea in Performance: 1500-2000 (2000); Heike Bartel and Anne Simon, Unbinding Medea (2010); and Anna Albrektson and Fiona Macintosh, Mapping Medea: Revolutions and Transfers 1750-1800 (2023).