Re-/Un-working Tragedy: Perspectives from the Global South

Day 1 – 6 December

Registration

Introduction

Ekin Bodur (University of Cambridge) and Clare L.E. Foster (CRASSH)

Conversations with Artists: Özlem Daltaban & Murat Daltaban (DOT Theatre Istanbul & Edinburgh)

Özlem and Murat have produced and directed Meet Me at Dawn, a version of Orpheus and Eurydice by Zinnie Harris at the Arcola Theatre, London for this season. Their co-production of Brecht’s “Mrs. Puntila and her Man Matti” is upcoming at Royal Lyceum Theatre and Citizen Theatre in Edinburgh in February 2020.

Keynote: Tina Chanter (Philosophy, Newcastle University)

Beyond Antigone’s Meanings: Unearthing the unthought ground under/on which Hegel’s Antigone might have buried a slave, with the help of Mbembe’s critique of black time, and reflections on the ‘Global South’

Tina Chanter is a Professor of Philosophy at Newcastle University. She has published on contemporary French philosophy, drawing inspiration from a range of sources, including feminist theory, race theory, psychoanalysis, art, politics, film and tragedy. Her most recent books are: Whose Antigone? The Tragic Marginalisation of Slavery, and Art, Politics and Rancière: Broken Perceptions. She taught in the US, most recently in Chicago, before returning to the UK, where she worked and taught in Bristol and London before her recent move to Newcastle University.

Tea and Coffee

Panel: A Case Study: “Antigones”

How does adapting tragedy bear witness to political conflict?

Chair: Andrés Henao Castro (University of Massachusetts, Boston) 

• Katherine Fleming (English and Drama, Queen Mary University of London) “Antigone, WWII and the battleground of philosophy”
• Kristina Hagström-Ståhl (Performative Arts, University of Gothenburg) “Un-doing Antigone”
• Ekin Bodur (English, University of Cambridge) “When Antigone embodies collective resistance”
• Andrés Henao Castro (University of Massachusetts, Boston) “Antigone and the necrodialectic of enforced disappearances.”

Lunch

Panel: Re-/Un-working tragedy in times/zones of crisis

 How do people in various zones of crisis embrace, interpret and adapt canonical traditions of tragedy to make sense of their suffering and express their resistance? 

 How might we rethink the adaptations of canonical tragedies as a destabilizing gesture – an un-working, rather than re-working – through perspectives from the Global South?

Chair: Barbara Goff (Classics, University of Reading) 

• Sola Adeyemi (Theatre and Performance, Goldsmiths University of London) “Re: Un/Working Canonical Texts: Interpreting the Modern African Literature”
• Ramona Mosse (Freie Universitat, Berlin)“Un-Working Tragedy in the 21st Century: Milo Rau’s Congo Tribunal”
• Miriam Leonard (Classics, University College London)“Tragedy and Emancipation”
• Rebekah Maggor (Performing and Media Arts, Cornell University)“Hamlet Wakes Up Late: A Syrian Satirical Tragedy for Interesting Times”

Tea and Coffee

Practical Workshop: “Can a dramatic text or performance ever be universal?”

Mark Maughan & Tim Cowbury (Theatre Makers, a Writer-Director Partnership)

The Claim (Oberon, 2018) is a theatre piece written by Tim Cowbury and directed by Mark Maughan that was researched and developed for three years before its first critically acclaimed UK tour in 17/18. It has since played Plaines Plough's Roundabout auditorium as part of the British Council Showcase in Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 and is currently booking an international tour for throughout 2020. 

Taking the slippery nature of translation and the Home Office’s interview process for granting asylum as its initial sources of inspiration, we set out to create a piece that was as engaging for those with little to no knowledge or experience of the process as it was for those who have lived experience of this flawed official system. 

This workshop will cover how we embarked on an integrated and lengthy research and development period, with the support of migrant organisations and asylum seekers and refugees, how Tim out of that wrote a text that is in turns absurd, hilarious and tragic. We will reflect on whether we have managed to create a truly 'universal' piece in the context of The Claim, whether there can be a decolonised text, and how the very notion of an assumed 'us’ is already  at play in many theatre texts, which forms part of the problem. 

Dinner (reserve your place via the event registration link)

Day 2 – 7th December

Panel: Deterritorialization / Reterritorialization: Global South Perspectives 

Is there such a thing as a global south perspective? Or perspectives? 

Do they use canonical counter-discourse to decolonize tragedy, and offer an immediate critique of the western idea of the canon? Or do they add pile upon pile on the very same canon?

Chair: Sami Everett (CRASSH, Univeristy of Cambridge)

Participants:

• Astrid Van Weyenberg (Film and Literary Studies, Leiden University)“Global South Adaptations: Some thoughts on Categorization & Comparison”
• Jane Montgomery Griffiths (Theatre and Performance, Monash University)“Queer adaptation and the hybridizing of Titus Andronicus”
• Anna Frieda Kuhn (Comparative Literature, University of Würzburg) “Sound and the South: Staging Greek Tragedy in Post-Colonial South Africa”
• Eylem Ejder (Theatre Studies, Ankara University)“Rewritten Tragedies, Unfinished Rehearsals: Dramaturgy of Interruption in Turkey”

Tea and Coffee

Roundtable Discussion: The Politics of Adaptation

Is there a unified or trans-historical idea of tragedy? 

Is adapting a Greek tragedy to comment on the political present unfair to the text? 

Chair: Zoe Svendsen (English, Cambridge University, Theatre Director)

Participants:

• Rosa Andujar (Liberal Arts and Classics, King’s College London) 
• Simon Goldhill (Classics, Cambridge University)
• Jennifer Wallace (English, Cambridge University)

Lunch

Conversation with artist: Basharat Peer (screenwriter, Haider (2014), a film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in Kashmir)

Basharat Peer is an opinion editor at The New York Times. He is the author of Curfewed Night (2010), an account of the conflict in Kashmir, and A Question of Order: India, Turkey and the Return of Strongmen (2017). He wrote the screenplay of Haider, a cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Related articles:

Basharat Peer: The man who scripted Haider, Business Standard
Kashmiri ‘Hamlet’ Stirs Rage in India, New York Times
New Shakespeare Movie Puts Hamlet In Kashmir, NPR

Final Address and Discussion:

Speaker: Ankhi Mukherjee (English and World Literatures, Oxford University)

“On Antigone’s Suffering”

My paper examines the symbolic overload of Antigone figurations in Hegel, Lacan, and Butler to study her strange reincarnations in postcolonial fiction, such as Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. In exegetical literature, Antigone stands interchangeably as the ethical subject, the force of resistance to the interdictions of state power, the claims of kinship (in tragic opposition to Creon’s claim of universality), messianic violence, anti-authoritarianism and feminism. Shamsie’s evocation of Antigone goes against the grain of Hegel’s reading of her as hypostatised law and Lacan’s deciphering in her actions the vicissitudes of Eros. Nor is the figure easily reducible to the claims of the non-normative family alone, as Butler famously argues. Like other works of postcolonial fiction before her, Shamsie foregrounds the raced body at the intersection of love and politics, society, faith and family: Antigone, here, is both timeless myth and a contingent redrawing of polity in the twenty-first century for the socially marginalised who seek cultural intelligibility. 

Moderator: Efe Khayyat (Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures, Rutgers University; Visiting Fellow at Woolf Institute, Cambridge University)

Final Discussion: Clare L. E. Foster