Antigone On The African Stage

Re-Entering Old
Spaces:
Essays on Anglo-American
Literature
Edited by
Marija Krivokapić
and Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević

Re-Entering Old Spaces: Essays on Anglo-American Literature
Edited by Marija Krivokapić and Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević
This book first published 2016
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2016 by Marija Krivokapić, Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević
and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-9044-8
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9044-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Marija Krivokapić and Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević
Beyond “the Myth of the Garden” and Turner’s Thesis.............................. 9
Artur Jaupaj
Re-Visiting Walden in the Light of H. Daniel Peck’s “The Worlding
of Walden”................................................................................................. 31
Božica Jović
Metamorphoses of the Devil in the Works of Percy and Mary Shelley..... 41
Giuseppe Barbuscia
Counterparts and Counterpoints in the Poetry of the Great War............... 65
Denis Kuzmanović
Degradation of the Human Soul in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot ..................... 87
Tomislav Kuna
Defamiliarization Revisited..................................................................... 105
Robert Sullivan
Narcissistic Religiosity in Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry...................... 115
Janko Andrijašević
Revisiting Old Texts as a Form of New Beginnings for the Author
of Ulysses ................................................................................................ 141
Vanja Vukićević Garić
Lawrence and Bataille: The Notion of Sacrifice and Violence
in “The Woman Who Rode Away”......................................................... 151
Nina Haritatou
Re-Enactment of Old Wounds: Hemingway, War and Gender............... 163
Aleksandra Žeželj Kocić

Table of Contents
vi
Re-Entering Totalitarian Hell in Twentieth-Century Literature:
The Allegories of Power and Dehumanization in George Orwell’s
1984 and Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams ................................... 187
Bavjola Shatro
Violence and Evil in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies...................... 209
Loran Gami
Revisiting Spaces over Time ................................................................... 223
Aleksandra V. Jovanović
Measure for Measure as an Expression of Growing Uncertainty
towards Monarchy and the Divine Order ................................................ 237
Branko Marijanović
Antigone on the African Stage................................................................. 257
Salih M. Hameed and Raad Kareem Abd-Aun
Contemporary Studies of Travel Writing ................................................ 279
Olivera Popović
“The Old is Better than Any Novelty”: Literary Venice ......................... 295
Ilda Erkoçi
Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 309
Index........................................................................................................ 315

ANTIGONE ON THE AFRICAN STAGE
SALIH M. HAMEED
AND RAAD KAREEM ABD-AUN
The prologue to this paper is inspired by Prof. Robert Sullivan’s
presentation of his article “The Concept of ‘De-familiarization’
Revisited.”1
Indeed, we as readers/audience of Antigone underwent a
process of familiarization in both the theme/cultural space of the dramatic
technicalities In the African Antigones, African dramatists exercised a
process of “de-familiarization” when the Greek form/content aspects are
fully “transformed” thematically and dramatically. Upon re-entering the
Antigone world, we, in fact, experiment a new experience of “re-
familiarization” enhanced by the African re-entering of the Antigone
myth. Hence, our re-visit is practically a process of “re-re-entry.”
The African dramatists, whose plays are examined in this paper, re-
entered the African myth afresh in the middle of and late in the twentieth
century. As critics, we have noticed that their re-entry is two-layered: the
“protest” theme is contemporarily employed to touch upon political and
postcolonial issues resulting from their colonizers’ ill treatment or
postcolonial rules. In the field of technique, the African playwrights re-
entered the “sphere” of dramatic technicalities available by the time,
making a “blend” of techniques that would help their “re-visits.” From
Pirandello, they reformulated the “illusion vs. reality” approach, and from
Brecht they reshaped the Alienation effect using it as a means of agitation,
hence the “agitprop” technique, let alone the Absurdist’s technicalities of
drama. This “blend” of such techniques helps much the process of de-
familiarization in search of “recognition” of the African continent in a
time of crisis.
1
Delivered on Oct. 2nd
, 2014 during the proceedings of the X International
Conference on English Language and Literary Studies, University of Montenegro,
Montenegro.

Antigone on the African Stage
258
Aesthetically and intellectually, life is centered around re-entering
old spaces.2
In The Second Shepherds Play, for instance, the Nativity story
is re-entered. Chaucer re-enters the story of Troilus and Cressida in his
Canterbury Tales, and in Dr. Faustus, Marlowe re-enters the folk legend
of Faust in the Faustbuch. Shakespeare’s plays are almost all re-enterings
of old spaces. Dryden re-enters Homer’s epics, and Tennyson does so with
the Arthurian legends in The Idylls of the King. When Pound and Eliot
met, they decided to re-enter the Jamesian novel and use in their poetry its
depiction of the cultural shock an American feels in Europe, and similarly,
Hughes re-enters Native American shamanism and folklore in his poetry.
And last but indeed not least, war is re-entered throughout human history,
each time the whole experience and its expression change. It is like
looking through a very transparent thin lightly tinted glass adding layer
after layer every time we look at the familiar, de-familiarizing it.
African playwrights, however, are not an exception; they have re-
entered the Antigone myth and re-formulated it anew to correspond to
their intentions. Thematically, they have wisely realized that the ancient
myth would vitally function to serve the treatment of serious problems.
Equally interesting, the African playwrights are familiar with the roles
drama can play in reshaping ill contemporary issues. Nonetheless, these
dramatists are quite aware that the intimate relation between drama and
man’s intellectual and socio-political domains is deeply dated back to the
Greek times where drama was born, and then nurtured in the cradle of the
church in medieval Europe. Since then, the intimacy has been growing
more potential continuously adapting techniques and approaches that
correspond to the necessities required for theme treatment. Indeed, the
wake of the twentieth century witnessed a time that was not entirely
friendly to arts and personal development. The youth was confronted by a
disastrous experience—World War I either froze or prevented
experimentation in drama, giving way to “drawing room plays,” which
Erwin Piscator believes to have been staged “mainly for commercial
reasons.”3
The catastrophic scene of almost fifteen million killed, more
millions seriously injured, and more dozens of millions on the march for
unknown territories, normally cannot (and might not) encourage people
(and by no means artists as well) but to tune their interests simply to the
2
Aleksandar Jerkov, “Re-entering Old Forms of Literature,” paper presented on
Oct. 2nd
, 2014 during the proceedings of the X International Conference on English
Language and Literary Studies, University of Montenegro, Montenegro.
3
Erwin Piscator, The Political Stage, translated by Hugh Rorrison (London: Eyre
Methuen, 1963), 8.

Salih M. Hameed and Raad Kareem Abd-Aun 259
calls of the war, at least initially for the early years of its wake. Besides,
the sweeping destruction of the world wars has not fully paralyzed the
“role” of arts and artists in making life. The Sisyphean spirit of arts has
revived out of the ashes of the wars, and the theatre has steadily restored
its main message; this time under the very impact of the war conditions
and its aftermath. As the war resulted in a sharp split in political systems
and philosophies, the arts has also undergone a similar transformation.
Such a new “slogan” as “art for the people” soon emerged not to indicate
“the abandonment of the bourgeois intellectual position” but the opinion
that the concept is “left quite intact,”4
it is not having been concerned with
the problem as much as it is with the form. The post-war mood of the
1920’s did not seem mature enough to employ drama as a political tool in
the service of political debate or argument. The need for a “vehicle” to
effectively live up to the “subject” encouraged dramatists all over the
world to seek literary trends that aptly and potentially embody the crises
the wars had brought.
It seems that in 1921, Luigi Pirandello paved the way for the
Absurdists in the pointlessness of man’s life and fruitlessness of human
endeavour, through his view of the similitude of theatre of life; hence, the
overlap of “illusion” and “reality.” Despite its potential influence on world
repute, Six Characters in Search of an Author hardly undertakes to treat
directly the crises of human existence resulting from the war years.
However, this is not, and ought not to be considered, a demerit of the
work, because if the play’s graces are rendered into a mere political
orientation, it is, therefore, some “violence to that which distinguishes it as
art, the uniqueness of its form.”5
Indeed, it is a fallacy to assume that the
worth of a work of art exclusively rests on its author’s potential ideology:
what significantly matters is “the degree to which the intention of the artist
enables him to see beyond the ideological perception of the world which
provides his stimulus.”6
It is, however, the power that transcends the
ideological statement; since the playwright is endowed with the insight to
foresee beyond such statements. Such creative employment has been
inspiringly exercised by Brecht and the Brechtians, where the theatre is
vitally transformed into a lecture hall, wherein the “people” are not stuffed
with “empty” slogans but agitated to take “action.”
Brecht’s dramatic technicalities of theatric orientation have
exercised a stimulating influence on the world post-war drama. Both
4
Ibid., 31.
5
Julian H. Wulbern, Brecht and Ionesco: Commitment in Context (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1971), 10.
6
Ibid., 99.

260
Brecht’s subtle didacticism and direct agitational address are vital in the
treatment of man’s helplessness against aggressive institutions. Brecht
always displays that the individual is helpless in this conflict if he is not
endowed with the demand of his own spirit; i.e. unless he is able to meet
the requirements of the challenge. Epic dramatists have basically made use
of Brecht’s principles which Martin Esslin finds “neither very complicated
not very new” although he acknowledges Brecht’s impact on “present-day
theatre.”7
The playwrights who are advocates of Epic Theatre have widely
adopted Brecht’s principles, which simply rest on the idea that “the
audience is to be confronted with a body of evidence from which it is to
draw its conclusions in a critical, highly lucid state of mind.”8
It is this intention, however, that the African playwrights have
adapted when drawing upon the Antigone myth. They have endeavoured
to explicate the extents to which this story can be employed to critically
serve the treatment of problems of African life. Besides, the wide and
popular implications of the story, which is already known to the audience,
the African dramatists have equally drawn upon both theatricalities of
world drama and African local colourings, which the playwrights strongly
tend to emphasize. It is, however, part of the playwrights’ interest in their
identity that they always foreground the African cultural and national
frames of mind as well as their people’s socio-political and intellectual
crises.
However, re-entering the old space of the canonical Antigone of
Sophocles by postcolonial dramatists acquires more subtle nuances. Helen
Tiffin terms the reworking of canonical literary works of the imperial
center by the post/colonized periphery “canonical counter-discourse.”9
According to Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, “counter-discourse
actively works to destabilise the power structures of the originary text
rather than simply to acknowledge its influence.”10
They also assert that
drama is particularly suited to counter-discursive intervention
and equally useful for its expression, since performance itself
replays an originary moment. […] Thus counter-discourse is
7
Martin Esslin, A Choice of Evils (London: Eyre Methuen, 1977), 110.
8
Ibid., 209.
9
Helen Tiffin, “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse,” in The Post-
colonial Studies Reader, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin
(London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 97.
10
Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice,
Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 16.

always possible in the theatrical presentation of a canonical text,
and even expected in some cases.11
The first (and probably the earliest) of the selected canonical
counter-discursive re-enterings of the Antigone of Sophocles is Odale’s
Choice, written by Edward Brathwaite (first performed 1962). Brathwaite
retains central elements from Sophocles, but he cut out what
might be described as the romantic dimension (sometimes seen
as resisting easy transplantation), simplified the issues of
conduct, and skillfully exploited opportunities for the
incorporation of local performance traditions.12
The playwright intended his play to be modernized, but not to belong to a
specific time, and localized in Africa, but not to one particular country.
However, James Gibbs suggests that Brathwaite was not completely
successful. The names of Odale and her sister, certain issues related to the
social system reflected in the play, and certain Creole phrases used by the
soldiers, tend to place the play in one country, rather than another.13
However, Gibbs tries to defend Brathwaite when he contests that the
playwright
cultivated the confusion of different popular usages in order to
work against too precise a location. If this is the case, the
pidgin becomes an honest reflection of the play’s destination
and origin: it is for Ghana, and about Ghana, but also part of
the process by which a Caribbean poet found his voice.14
As sound as this justification might seem, Braithwaite seemed to have
been confused and failed the attempt to universalize the play.
However, the most notable difference between the Greek original
and Braithwaite’s version lies in the last scene when Odale (Antigone) and
Creon face each other at the end of the play.15
When Creon attempts to
11
Ibid., 18.
12
James Gibbs, Nkyin-Kyin, Essays on the Ghanaian Theatre (Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2009), 43.
13
James Gibbs, op. cit., 44-45.
14
Ibid., 45.
15
Elisabetta Forin, “Antigone in Anglophone African Literature,” Unpublished
MA thesis, University of Padua, 44, (retrieved 4/11/2014)
tesi.cab.unipd.it/43948/1/2013_Forin_Elisabetta.pdf.

262
begin his interrogation of Odale, and hence initiate the agony as in the
Greek original, Odale simply says that such an interrogation is needless:16
ODALE (Quietly) Uncle, why do you trouble yourself? Why
do you bother to question me? You know very well what I
went for and what I was doing, when I went out there alone, in
the night.
(The enormity of what she is saying is beginning to dawn on
Creon.)
CREON What! What child! What are you saying?
ODALE I am saying, my lord, that I went out to do what you
knew I would do; what I had to do; what it was my duty to
do.17
This undermines Creon’s legitimacy, unlike the original play.18
The chorus intervenes to save Odale and Creon grants her pardon,
which she refuses. Her refusal is a choice identical to her decision to break
Creon’s laws and uphold those of the gods:
ODALE Because, my lord, there is a greater law. Greater than
yours and all the priests’ and judges’. And that law says that
the living must bury their dead. He was my brother, if he
wasn’t your nephew; and I should have fallen before my gods,
if I had scorned that law.
CREON So you mean you chose19
Creon is infuriated by her refusal of his pardon, and she trades parts with
her dead brother to become the public spectacle. With this, Odale’s Choice
not only replaces the sister for the brother, but also denies any relation to
all versions of Oedipal aggression, thus setting itself apart from the Greek
original.20
The play speaks forcibly as a canonical counter-discourse
disconnecting itself from its Greek roots to forcefully plant itself in
Western African soil interrogating not only Odale’s power of choice and
sovereignty over the play as she strides along at the end of the play
16
James Gibbs, op. cit., 45.
17
Edward Brathwaite, Odale’s Choice (Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1967), 25-26. All
further quotations are from this edition and will be given parenthetically
henceforward.
18
Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson, Crossroads in the Black Aegean: Oedipus,
Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 222.
19
Ibid., 28.
20
Ibid., 228.

declaring, “Of my own free will, I will go!”21
, but also the Greek original
which was long claimed by the colonial master to be a masterpiece.
Antigone in Haiti by Felix Morisseau-Leroy (first performed
1963) was written in Ghana after the playwright departed into exile to
Haiti in 1959. It was one of the first things he did while there and was “a
revealing choice for a newly arrived political exile.”22
His play was not
written in French (originally it was written in Creole, the language of the
periphery, and not French, the language of the colonial centre); it featured
gods that were neither Greek nor Catholic but rather Vodou. Thus,
Antigone becomes Haitian and not Greek, hence removing the canonical
text from the centre to the periphery creating a canonical counter-
discourse.23
Morisseau-Leroy believes that Haiti has a popular theatre that
could serve as a counter-movement to the Eurocentric theatre of the
colonizer. This theatre is Vodou as he states: “the peristil where Vodou
ceremonies take place is also a theatre stage where a perfect spectacle
takes place.”24
Morisseau-Leroy attempts not to adapt the play, but rather
“rewrite Sophocles from a Haitian point of view.”25
He considers Vodou
to be inscribed in “the social praxis” of its people; it could “turn forms of
oppression into a struggle for liberation.”26
The play begins with a prologue which explains what the
playwright did to change the play and remove from the Eurocentric
sphere:
The tale is unchanged.
But we add to the story that came to us
The salt and the sun
The sun and the saviour of Africa
Or the isle of Haiti.
21
Ibid., 32.
22
Gibbs, op. cit., 26.
23
Moira Fradinger, “Danbala’s Daughter: Felix Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn an
Kreyòl,” in Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, edited by Erin B. Mee
and Helene P. Foley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 129.
24
Felix Morisseau-Leroy, “Plaidoyer pour un theatre en creole,” Panorama, Port
au Prince (June 1950), in Fradinger, 133.
25
Judy Cantor, “The Voice of Haiti,” Miami New Times (May 2, 1996)
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1996-05-02/news/the-voice-of-haiti/full/,
accessed November 7, 2014.
26
Moira Fradinger, op. cit., 134.

264
We add gods. African gods.27
Then the chorus says that the story could happen wherever there is a “girl/
Antigone who says ‘no’” and a “chief who rules,” “a master who’ll not
head advice.”28
After establishing the universality of the play and
explaining that the plot, which is largely similar to the Greek tragedy, the
playwright opens the play with a very emphatic “No.”29
Antigone refuses to be accompanied by her sister Ismene, who
seeks the help of their Grand-Aunt through making a “joujou.”30
The
Grand-Aunt commences with the ceremony skipping the song and
incantation that precede the Vodou ceremony due to the urgency of the
matter. Papa Legba answers but says that he cannot help in this matter:
Priestess, child of mine
you know I’d do all in my power
for a child of dead king Oedipus.
But here there is nothing, nothing
nothing worth while [sic] I can do.31
Antigone is abandoned by the gods in a series of abandonments in the
play. Papa Legba’s absence signifies a break between the world of the
spirit of the ancestors and Creon’s house.32
The two women rush inside as Creon and Tiresias enter. The seer
tries to warn Creon against his decision not to bury Polynices. Creon,
however, is angry at Tiresias’s intervention. The latter leaves saying: “But
pay heed to what I say.”33
However, upon seeing the materials used by
Grand-Aunt, he asks Tiresias because he wants to know “what the gods
have inside it.”34
The tone of sarcasm is clear in Creon’s voice. However,
what is said to him is not funny at all.
Tiresias calls upon Madam Erzuli to tell Creon “what is
happening in Thebes.”35
The goddess herself repeats Tiresias’s warning
27
Felix Morisseau-Leroy, “Antigone in Haiti” (unpublished typescript), 2. All
further quotations are from this edition and will be given parenthetically
henceforward.
28
Ibid., 3.
29
Ibid., 4.
30
Ibid., 6.
31
Ibid.
32
33
Felix Morisseau-Leroy, “Antigone in Haiti,” 8.
34
Ibid., 9.
35
Ibid.

and foretells the same disasters the latter does. She tells Tiresias not to call
her again “for somebody who won’t listen.”36
This is the second time the
gods abandon the house of Oedipus.37
Creon is not happy with what he
hears and blames the gods for it:
Where were the spirits of our ancestors when all of us in
Thebes were all fighting each other? Why didn’t Madam Erzuli
take Polynices by the hand and drag him away from his
country’s enemies?38
Filo, Creon’s counselor, tells Creon that Antigone buried her brother
Polynices. The account of the burial and the circumstances around it are
supernatural. There is wind, rain, lightning and dust, but not around the
body nor around Antigone. A grave is dug and covered by itself. When
Antigone comes, she tells Creon that she buried her brother. He tries to
talk to her, but she insists on defying him. He sends her to prison, only to
be confronted by his son, Hemon. His son, too, turns against him and
leaves him with fair warning: “King Creon, I am leaving you to your
darkness. I am going where there is light. God has turned his back on you,
King Creon. The spirits have turned their backs on you.”39
This infuriates Creon who summons Secle-Quitte, guardian of the
dead, to turn Antigone into a zombie by killing her soul. He summons her
soul into a glass of water, which turns red when he stabs it with a knife.
Tiresias enters declaring that the gods have abandoned Creon, because
they have not allowed him to do so, and are not with him as he claims.
Moira Fradinger suggests that Creon’s act is a “metaphor of national
consciousness: it represents the complete loss of will on the part of the
slave; it is a body whose soul has been robbed with black magic and can
be used to serve a human master.”40
Antigone’s “No,” which opens the
play, is everything the Haitian revolution stands for41
; it is the will to stand
in the face of tyranny which Creon wants to usurp.
To prove that the gods are on his side, Creon asks Tiresias to call
Damballa. Damballa does not appear, which is another abandonment by
the gods.42
Morisseau-Leroy says that “Damballah didn’t come because
36
Ibid., 10.
37
Ibid., 139.
38
Ibid., 10-11.
39
Ibid., 17.
40
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid., 142.

266
Damballah didn’t approve of [Creon’s] political action. Damballah didn’t
come because he was on the side of Antigone.”43
Fardinger suggests that
the climactic point when Creon realizes the catastrophe that befalls him
coincides with the most climactic point in a Vodou ceremony, the crisis of
possession, “the most emblematic moment of the intimate relation between
Vodou and theatrical performance.”44
Grand-Aunt comes in possessed by
Erzuli and tells Tiresias to summon dead Antigone to stop Hemon from
dying. Tiresias summons Antigone and along her voice he hears Hemon
saying “Antigone, give me your hand to cross over.”45
Hemon is dead but
there is still another calamity to befall Creon. His wife kills herself after
she hears the news of Antigone’s and Hemon’s death.
Creon prohibits crying and the final words in the play are Filo’s
acceptance of the order: “Yes, King Creon.”46
Filo’s final bow is in sharp
contrast to Antigone’s initial refusal.
The tragic spirit of the play is not Antigòn’s death: she lives
eternally as a Haitian ancestor. Rather, the tragedy is obedience
to all that stands opposed to Antigòn’s rebellion—an obedience
to a new form of slavery.47
The play makes the elite culture legitimate to the peasants, and
vice versa, in Haiti. Elsewhere, it is a far cry against tyranny and
usurpation of will. It is also a strong counter-discourse that reinterprets, re-
enters, a western canonical text in the light of Vodou, the culture of the
periphery, bringing that culture to center in the process, and wedding the
western theatre and performance tradition to that of Haiti and Africa.
Athol Fugard’s The Island (devised with John Kani and Winston
Ntshona) belongs to the category of plays which recall not only ancient
Antigone’s myth but the Pirandello technique and theatricality. The
Island’s two actors-characters are presented in a cell on Robin Island
engaging in a Vladimir-Estragon-like dialogue, which they describe as
“nonsense”48
that equally recalls Waiting for Godot (it is most likely that
Fugard had in mind the American San Francisco director who risked
43
Felix Morisseau-Leroy, untitled, Callaloo 15: no. 3 (Summer, 1992), 669.
44
Moira Fradinger, op. cit., 141-142.
45
Felix Morisseau-Leroy, op. cit., 20.
46
Ibid., 21.
47
Ibid., 143.
48
Athol Fugard, Township Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 198.
All further quotations are from this edition and will be given parenthetically
henceforward.

presenting Waiting for Godot in the famous city prison of the state). John
and Winston argue about Antigone’s necklace and reflect: “There’s six
days to go to the concert. We’re committed. We promised the chaps we’d
do something. This Antigone is just right for us. Six more days and we’ll
make it”49
(emphasis edited). It is believed that the recurrent reference to
the number “six” cannot be arbitrary, nor is the statement of Antigone
being “right” for the prisoners. Fugard’s setting of the play is the notorious
apartheid-era South African prison island, Robin Island, where most
African political prisoners were held or banished is a factual reminder for
the audience of the time of the African’s struggle and resistance for
equality and independence. Hence, the potential theme of the play.
The Island is, however, a perfect embodiment of the African
implication of the myth politically; for the devisers use theatricality to
express the themes of the play; however, taking the Antigone myth to a
whole new level of adaptation. It has its origin in acting exercises. These
seem to begin, as Fugard’s Notebooks affirm, in the form of an image that
grows in his consciousness and is then transmitted to the actors with
whom he works so intimately,50
namely Winston Ntshona and John Kani
who gave their names to the characters.
The play begins with a Sisyphean prologue showing the prisoners
shoveling sand into a wheelbarrow to fill another prisoner’s hole. This is
meant to break the prisoners’ spirit. The whistle blows and the shackled
men are taken into their cell.
The play centers on John and Winston’s plan to act Antigone before
the other prisoners and wardens. Like Kani, and Ntshona—who
collaborated with Fugard when he wrote The Island—“the prisoners are
not merely actors but playwrights. They forge drama, an art that is an
affirmation of their humanity.”51
They ensure their survival through
acting. Fugard has chosen the Antigone myth because it represents
protest,52
and in the play the boundaries between myth, life, and theatre are
shattered.
The surprising news set the two prisoners against each other. John
is told that his appeal was approved and his sentence is reduced to three
years and that he will be released within three months. Winston is sad,
49
Athol Fugard, The Island, in Township Plays, 199.
50
Athol Fugard, Plays One (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), vii-viii, quoted in
Albert Wertheim, The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the
World (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 88.
51
Albert Wertheim, op. cit., 92.
52
Ibid., 94.

268
angry and envious and the prospect of life imprisonment keeps darkening
his eyes:
When you go to the quarry tomorrow, take a good look at old
Harry. Look into his eyes, John. Look at his hands. They’ve
changed him. They’ve turned him into stone. Watch him work
with that chisel and hammer. Twenty perfect blocks of stone
every day. Nobody else can do it like him. He loves stone.
That’s why they’re nice to him. He’s forgotten himself. He’s
forgotten everything […] why he’s here, where he comes from.
That’s happening to me John. I’ve forgotten why I’m here.53
The myth of Sisyphus reappears as Winston sees in Harry a future image
of himself.
The men bypass this and manage to present their play. In the
prologue, John says: “Captain Prinsloo, Hodoshe, Warders, […] and
Gentlemen!”54
Albert Wertheim argues
The pause indicated in the text of the first sentence […]
pointedly endows the prisoners with gentility while separating
them from the officials of oppressive state power. Furthermore,
using the word “arrested” to describe Antigone’s situation
raises the specter of the modern polity, and in particular the
South African state. It is a word that succinctly captures the
bond between the ancient Antigone legend and the events of
contemporary history, fixing the Antigone story as a symbol for
John and Winston’s plight as well as for all who protest and
resist in South Africa. This is nicely and pointedly italicized
when after his exposition of Antigone’s actions and subsequent
arrest, John states that “that is why” they are presenting their
play.55
The essence of The Island is contained between its absurd Sisyphean
beginning and its glorious Sophoclean end, and it is concerned with the
way in which the plight of Sisyphus can be connected with, and
transformed into, the power of Antigone.56
Nevertheless, it is a subtle
dramatic device to revive the African consciousness of the offense not of
the “black” prisoners, but of the “white” warden; whence, historically,
even the prisoners themselves were divided into three categories. It is,
53
Ibid., 220-221.
54
Ibid., 223.
55
Ibid., 97.
56
Ibid., 89-90.

therefore, very functional that the play itself and the rehearsal are
Antigone oriented. The call for the revival of genuine protest underlined
by the Sisyphean image is still the main intention which is rendered into a
motif in other African plays despite the variety of approaches and diversity
of functions adopted to deal with this theme.
Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An African Antigone57
(performed
1994) is another example of such intentions. He uses the ancient Greek
myth to comment on both postcolonial Nigeria and the then present
Nigeria where military dictators thrive. Osofisan’s theatrical practice is
characterized by a critical re-evaluation of the past,58
which explains
setting the play in colonial Nigeria at the end of the 19th
century, which is
also an apt commentary on the present. Despite the acknowledged reliance
on the ancient Greek version, the playwright also departs from the
Antigone version. Dramatically, he introduces some “new characters” as
well as experimenting “shifts in the plot”59
both of which contribute to the
Africanization of the Greek myth to either denounce the colonial
oppression or enhance postcolonial protest and resistance.
Osofisan changes certain elements in the plot so that he can better
express his vision of the play. Unlike Creon, Carter-Ross, the colonial
governor, is already in power and he is involved in the civil war, and is
actively involved in sabotaging Tegonni’s marriage by placing her
brother’s body in front of the palace. He dramatically applies the divide-
and-rule strategy to pose his control.60
He represents both former colonial
and present military despotism that storms Nigeria.61
The African
Antigone fails Ross’s attempt to pose power, for Tegonni is present not
only as an agent of resistance, but also as an agent of social change. By
choosing to be a bronze caster, she defies male dominance over this
profession helping other women become bronze casters. Astrid Van
Weyenberg argues,
57
Femi Osofisan, Recent Outings: Tegonni, An African Antigone and Many Colors
Make the Thunder-King (Ibadan, Nigeria: Opon Ifa Readers, 1999).
58
Astrid Van Weyenberg, “Revolutionary Muse: Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni: An
African Antigone,” in Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and
Criticism, edited by S. E. Wilmer and Audrone Zukauskaite (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010), 368.
59
Barbara Goff, “Antigone’s Boat: The Colonial and the Postcolonial in Tegonni:
An African Antigone by Femi Osofisan,” in Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds,
edited by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 42.
60
Astrid Van Weyenberg, op. cit., 370.
61
Ibid.

270
Osofisan not only offers a critique of the colonial, but also the
post-colonial condition […] Showing the ways in which the
past still haunts the present, Osofisan engages with problems
that are painfully familiar to his contemporary Nigerian
audience, thereby calling for their active engagement.62
In conclusion, both Astrid Van Weyenberg and Barbara Goff argue that
Osofisan’s Tegonni
is already part of Africa. If we accept this reading, we can see
that one important aspect of the play’s postcolonial politics is
this over to erase Africa’s colonial history, by making
Antigone into an African and subsuming her colonial lineage
within her African identity. That she is indeed part of an
indigenous tradition is asserted by the play’s title, or rather
subtitle; ‘an’ African Antigone reminds us that this drama can
acknowledge the plural parentage of Brathwaite and Fugard, as
well as of Sophocles and Anouilh. Tegonni’s most postcolonial
gesture, perhaps, is to make the colonial disappear.63
It is indeed an impressive treatment that the audience is made to be aware
that the African Antigone is not a woman of ancient Greece arriving from
a far-off distance of time and place as much as she is an African woman
on African soil. In brief, she is Africa. It is, therefore, evident that the
African playwrights already studied have formulated the Greek myth to
underline their people’s revival and restoration of the “spirit” to resist
colonizers or challenge tyrants and oppressors. Interestingly, they have
genuinely sought world dramatic techniques that can make possible the
achievement of their aims.
Sabata Sesiu’s Giants, written in 2000 and performed in 2001, is
an interesting example of rich native African colourings and contemporary
politico-feminist treaties. The play whose playwright labels it as inspired
by Antigone and the Sotho legend of Hodhova, inter-relatedly combines
the African traditions of music, dancing, mime, storytelling and scenes of
dialogue to present a new contemporary version of Antigone. Besides the
recurrent theme of “protest,” the play warns against the dangers of
dictatorship and, by implication, commends the new South African
constitution with its guarantee of freedom and equality for all citizens.64
62
Ibid., 370-371.
63
Ibid., 376; Goff, op. cit., 53.
64
B. van Zyl Smit, “The Reception of Greek Tragedy in the ‘Old’ and ‘New’
South Africa,” Akroterion 48 (2003), 16.

The play is set in “rural Africa regardless of the period. The play
takes place anywhere in Africa./ It does not matter whether it is the north,
south, west, east or central Africa […] Anywhere in the world.”65
Dramatically, this statement graces the play with a universal label of the
very time it focuses on its “Africanness”: the play can take place at
anytime, anywhere in Africa. Hence, the African “identity.” Giants
engages with the problems of African postcoloniality as they emerged
throughout the continent after liberation: the tensions between tradition
and modernity, customary and civic law are examined under the
overarching question of the nature and form of leadership in the post- and
neo-colonial Africa. The play explores issues of power and law, which
make it directly relevant to the contradictions of the process of nation
building that South Africa must face. Its rural setting implies that part of
the contradictions in the process of nation building lies in the tension
between customary and civic law, subjecthood and citizenship as sites of
contrasting political traditions and practices that the nation building
process must inevitably address if democracy is to be achieved.66
The playwright uses the same conflict between Nontombi
(Antigone) and King Makhanda (Creon) and structures his play around it.
The play opens in the cave of Shango with a song that forebodes death and
destruction. Scene Two shows Nontombi and Asanti dreaming about their
wedding. In Scene Three, Shango and the dancers tell the story of
Nontombi’s two brothers, Sizwe and Sechaba, whose names mean nation
in Xhosa and Zulu, and in Sotho and Tswana, respectively.67
Makhanda
forbids the burial of Sizwe who was exiled and fought against him, while
giving full honours to Sechaba who supported him. Noontombi attempts to
bury her brother. She is captured and tortured. At the end of the play, in a
late awakening and after the intervention of Shango, Makhanda goes to
Nontombi’s cell to find her dead. His son kills himself; he receives news
of his wife’s suicide as well. He is destroyed at the end of the play.
Sabata Sesiu, however, changes the tragedy to befit the South
African postcolonial context. As Aktina Stathaki argues:
65
Sabata Sesiu, “Giants” (unpublished typescript). I would like to thank the
playwright for providing me with a copy of the play.
66
M. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press), 217, in Aktina Stathaki,
“Adaptation and Performance of Greek Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa”
(unpublished thesis, University of Toronto, 2009), 204-205.
67
Zel Smit, op. cit., 17.

272
There are two important interventions to the Sophoclean
tragedy: firstly, Sabata presents Makhanda as an authoritarian
African leader whose rule is from the beginning of the play
illegitimate; secondly, he makes all his characters more directly
complicit in Nontombi’s action diffusing resistance among all
of them. These interventions must be explained under the light,
on the one hand, of postcolonial issues of leadership and
agency and, on the other hand, the characteristics of materialist
tragedy which emerged in the African cultural discourse to
address those political issues from a culturalist perspective.68
Makhanda and Creon have many similar characteristics: both mix their
authority as males with that of the political leader and interpret the
woman’s action as doubly transgressive not only to their civic but also to
their gender roles; Makhanda too conflates the oikos with the polis
viewing the city as an extension of the household and, therefore, his
property to rule in any way he sees fit; even in his language Makhanda,
like Creon, has a preference for the use of proverbs and generalized,
simple, “universal” truths—characteristic of many contemporary
totalitarian leaders.69
The first crucial difference between Giants and
Antigone is that the former’s concern is not to show how the ruler risks
becoming authoritarian, as in the case of Creon, but how he already is
authoritarian and needs to change: Makhanda as the central tragic hero
should be understood as a historical subject in the midst of social changes
which he is unable to perceive.70
The first agent of resistance is, interestingly, the dead Sizwe. The
symbolic function of his body and the significance of his burial must be
understood first in the African cultural context where burying and
honouring the dead is a duty and a benefit both for the living and the dead.
Neglect or denial of burial is considered a punishment for both the dead
and the living who will be haunted by the unburied ancestor.71
This context is echoed in Sabata’s politicization of Sizwe’s death.
The play openly sides with the dead when it describes him as the freedom
fighter that came to fight against Makhanda’s tyrannical laws. Sizwe
fought against his own brother not for their own claims to power, as
68
Aktina Stathaki, op. cit., 221.
69
Mark Griffith, “Introduction” in Antigone, edited by Mark Griffith (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36-37.
70
Aktina Stathaki, op. cit., 221-222.
71
Kevin J. Wetmore, Athenian Sun in An African Sky Modern African Adaptations
of Classical Greek Tragedy (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: MacFarland,
2000), 176.

Polyneikes and Eteocles, but for the sake of Makhanda. Their conflict then
is, as in the case of the two sisters, an opposition imposed by the tyrannical
state rather than being their own choice. In Giants then, although the dead
body is the site of conflict between Nontombi and Makhanda as in
Antigone, it acquires additional meanings. Because Sizwe in life was a
direct threat to Makhanda’s rule his dead body acquires a symbolic
significance: to acknowledge him in death would mean to acknowledge his
opposition. Punishing him in death serves as a symbolic act of punishment
for anyone who opposes him and acts as a reminder of the allegiances that
the people are forced to make for or against the state. Sizwe is not an
individual case but part of a continuum, one among many who fought
against Makhanda and punishment is essential in suppressing those who
will decide to follow him. To bury him would mean to restore his status as
a citizen: as a dissident Sizwe was an exile in life and so he must remain in
death.72
The dead body is further invested with an agency, as it constitutes
a threat even after death: Sizwe’s body, like Polyneikes’, resists
decomposition. While in Antigone this was a sign from the gods that
Creon fails to see, here it suggests the continuity between the living and
the dead and the ever-presence of what Sizwe stood for:
Shango: This is a miracle.
Someone passing from a distance would bet on a calf
That the body was asleep
NOT DEAD
Dancers: Beware Makhanda, Beware!
The body is not dead
The body is asleep
Beware Makhanda beware!
73
It is the three women in the play, Nontombi, Nozizwe, and Wanjiru, as
well as his son Asante, who will undertake the role to challenge
Makhanda’s way of leadership and to try to fuse his governance with
ethical qualities.74
In the confrontation between Makhanda and Nontombi, the
authority of ancestral laws is placed against the arbitrariness of the Big
Man’s decision-making authority. Makhanda is a tyrannical ruler, but with
this decision against Sizwe he tests his subjects’ tolerance as he
72
Aktina Stathaki, op. cit., 231-232.
73
Ibid., 232.
74
Ibid., 233.

274
transgresses not only human but also ancestral laws. Seen in the context of
the illegitimacy of Makhanda’s rule, Nontombi’s defense of the ancestral
laws does not take the form of a conflictual duty between city and family
as it is for Antigone. Rather, it is the proposition of an altogether
alternative form of understanding leadership: the ancestral laws become an
expression of a democratic ideal and a means of legitimation of power.75
Furthermore, in her speech, given below, Nontombi distinguishes between
the people and Makhanda, whereas Antigone distinguishes between
respect for the gods or Creon:
Nont: You and I know that the heads would be used as a
communication channel with the ancestral spirits. We both
know that each child that is born in this country is named after
the skull in the sacred caves […]. YOU are named after the
skull in the head. Your spiritual welfare is safeguarded by the
skulls in the sacred caves […] There are people like me out
there, who are governed by laws such as this one and are
prepared to defend them until the end. I would rather respect
them than you. 76
Whereas Nonzizwe, Makhanda’s wife, uses her politics of compassion
where human empathy coexists with the duties of statesmanship,
Nontombi challenges Makhanda’s rule with tradition, and Asante
challenges Makhanda directly with the principles of democracy forcefully
defending the public will against his father’s authoritarian decision-
making.77
At the end of the play, Makhanda is punished by the destruction of
his family and the plunging of the city into chaos as the playwright warns
against the inevitable chaos that awaits if things in the African postcolony
do not change. But Nontombi, as well as everyone else who opposed him,
suffers violence and death. However, this is not a punishment as much as
it is a sacrifice that elevates the characters, particularly the females, to a
symbolic status.78
Physically, death is destruction but not defeat. It is the
spirit to protest that is kept alive and living: it is all Africans called upon to
tread upon the right way of life and living, both under colonialism or
postcolonialism.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 235.
77
Ibid., 236, 241.
78
Ibid., 243.

Nonetheless, the plays already investigated are not the only
African versions of the Greek myth. It is true that the Africanized
Antigone plays show great ingenuity on the part of the playwrights in
manipulating an ancient Greek text used by hegemonic imperialist powers
to instill in the colonized the belief that Western literature is the zenith of
human creativity in letters. By choosing Sophocles’ Antigone, the
playwrights have re-entered an old space long canonized by the imperial
West. By so doing, they created strong canonical counter-discourse to
prove that Africa is capable of rivaling the West at its own game of theatre
and performance, undermining suppositions of the supremacy of the
canonical text, and thus undermining the very foundations of imperialism
itself.
Works Cited
Brathwaite, Edward. Odale’s Choice. Ibadan: Evans Brothers, 1967.
Cantor, Judy. “The Voice of Haiti.” Miami New Times (May 2 1996)
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/1996-05-02/news/the-voice-of-
haiti/full. Accessed November 7, 2014.
Esslin, Martin. A Choice of Evils. London: Eyre Methuen, 1977.
Forin, Elisabetta. “Antigone in Anglophone African Literature.”
Unpublished MA thesis, University of Padua.
tesi.cab.unipd.it/43948/1/2013_Forin_Elisabetta.pdf.
Accessed November 4, 2014.
Fradinger, Moira. “Danbala’s Daughter: Felix Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn
an Kreyòl.” In Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, ed.
B. Mee and Helene P. Foley. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011: 127-146.
Fugard, Athol. “The Island.” In Township Plays. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000: 193-227.
—. Plays One. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. In Albert Wertheim. The
Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to the World.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000.
Gibbs, James. Nkyin-Kyin. Essays on the Ghanaian Theatre. Amsterdam
and New York: Rodopi, 2009.
Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins. Post-Colonial Drama: Theory,
Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
Goff, Barbara and Michael Simpson. Crossroads in the Black Aegean:
Oedipus, Antigone, and Dramas of the African Diaspora. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007.

276
Goff, Barbara. “Antigone’s Boat: The Colonial and the Postcolonial in
Tegonni: An African Antigone by Femi Osofisan.” In Classics in
Post-Colonial Worlds, ed. Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: 40-53.
Griffith, Mark. “Introduction” in Antigone. Edited by Mark Griffith.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 1-68.
Jerkov, Aleksandar. “Re-entering Old Forms of Literature.” Delivered on
Oct. 2nd, 2014 during the proceedings of the X International
Conference on English Language and Literary Studies, University
of Montenegro, Montenegro.
Mamdani, M. Citizen and Subject. Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Late Colonialism. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press,
1996. In Aktina Stathaki, “Adaptation and Performance of Greek
Drama in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Unpublished thesis,
University of Toronto, 2009.
Morisseau-Leroy, Felix. “Antigone in Haiti” (unpublished typescript).
—. “Plaidoyer pour un theatre en creole,” Panorama, Port au Prince (June
1950).
—. Untitled, Callaloo 15: no. 3 (Summer, 1992), 667-670.
Osofisan, Femi. “Tegonni: An African Antigone.” In Recent Outings:
Tegonni, An African Antigone and Many Colors Make the
Thunder-King. Ibadan, Nigeria: Opon Ifa Readers, 1999: 5-141.
Piscator, Erwin. The Political Stage. Translated by Hugh Rorrison.
London: Eyre Methuen, 1963.
Sesiu, Sabata. Giants (unpublished typescript).
Stathaki, Aktina. “Adaptation and Performance of Greek Drama in Post-
Apartheid South Africa.” Unpublished thesis, University of
Toronto, 2009.
Sullivan, Robert. “The Concept of ‘De-familiarization’ Revisited.”
Delivered on Oct. 2nd, 2014 during the proceedings of the X
International Conference on English Language and Literary
Studies, University of Montenegro, Montenegro.
Tiffin, Helen. “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-discourse.” In The
Post-colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths
and Helen Tiffin. London and New York: Routledge, 1995: 95-
98.
Wetmore, Kevin J. Athenian Sun in An African Sky Modern African
Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy. Jefferson, North
Carolina and London: MacFarland 2000.
Weyenberg, Astrid Van. “Revolutionary Muse: Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni:
An African Antigone.” In Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern

Philosophy and Criticism, ed. S. E. Wilmer and Audrone
Zukauskaite. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010: 366-378.
Wertheim, Albert. The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa
to the World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University
Press, 2000.
Wulbern, Julian H. Brecht and Ionesco: Commitment in Context. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Zyl Smit, B. van. “The Reception of Greek Tragedy in the ‘Old’ and
‘New’ South Africa.” Akroterion 48 (2003): 3-20.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Raad Kareem ABD-AUN is a faculty member at the University of Babylon.
He was awarded a Ph.D. in English Literature in 2011. He published
several papers in Iraqi academic journals, as well as several poems in
international print and electronic journals. His main research interest is
postcolonial literature and literary theory. His publications include: The
“Other” in Postcolonial Drama: A Comparative Study in Selected
Postcolonial Plays in English and Arabic (book, 2014), several papers in
Iraqi academic journals, as well as translations of several plays by
American, European, and African playwrights.
Janko ANDRIJAŠEVIĆ (b. 1971) graduated from the English Department of
the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić in 1995. He got his M.A. degree at the
Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade in 2000. In 2005 he
defended his doctoral dissertation on eclectic religion in Aldous Huxley’s
prose at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad. Since
1995 he has been employed at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić. His
research interests include: literature and psychology, psychology of
religion, medical humanities.
Giuseppe BARBUSCIA was born in Cesena (Italy) and completed his
Master’s Degree in English and Spanish at the University of Catania
(Italy). He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English Literature at the
University of Mostar (Bosnia-Herzegovina).
Ilda ERKOÇI is a lecturer at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Luigj
Gurakuqi University of Shkodra in Albania. After a Joint Master’s in
Venice, she gained her Ph.D. at the University of Tirana with a
dissertation on literary tourism. She likes to explore apparently uncommon
links such as those between literature and geography or economy and has a
special craving for interdisciplinary topics. Her major academic interests
in addition to literary tourism include Sociolinguistics and translation
studies.

Notes on Contributors
310
Loran GAMI teaches British Literature at the Faculty of Foreign
Languages, University of Tirana. His fields of interest include British and
American literature, linguistics, and translation. His Ph.D. thesis focuses
on the various aspects of Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics. He has published
various articles on Samuel Beckett’s aesthetics, drama theory, and other
twentieth-century British writers. His most recent publications deal with
the work of William Golding and Graham Swift, focusing on the historical
and the sociological aspects of these works. He has also taken part at a
number of conferences focusing on literature, culture, and history. His
academic experience includes a successful scholarship at George
Washington University, in Washington, DC.
Salih Mahdi HAMEED is a Professor of English Literature at the
University of Babylon. He considers himself an admirer of academic
teaching and educational duties. Besides the forty-three years he has
devoted to these tasks, he aspires to discover ways through which he keeps
in touch with new findings in these fields. His publications include: I Will
Go with the Church Against the King: A Study in the Beckett Plays (book,
2010), An Approach to Yusuf Sura as Drama (book, 2010), over 20
papers, as well as translations of several plays and other books.
Nina HARITATOU has obtained a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Newcastle
University where she is a Staff Tutor at the Department of English
Language and Literature. She has also studied Greek philosophy at the
Athens University (first degree) and she has numerous publications in
Greek, French, English and Australian scientific magazines. She is the
author of the book English and American Literary Texts which is being
taught to young (13-17 years old) learners of the English language in
Greek public schools.
Artur JAUPAJ holds a Ph.D. from Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
(2005) and has very recently been awarded the title of Associate Professor
from the University of Tirana. A member of European Society for the
Study of English (ESSE) and board member of the Albanian Society for
the Study of English (ASSE), he has published extensively and delivered
many papers on topics covering society, culture, and educational issues.
He is also quite keen on matters related to Higher Education (HE) and the
introduction of new technologies for educational purposes.

Re-Entering Old Spaces: Essays on Anglo-American Literature 311
Aleksandra V. JOVANOVIĆ graduated from the Faculty of Philology in
Belgrade and she gained MA and Ph.D. in English Literature at the
Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. The title of her Ph.D. thesis is Greek
Mythology in the Novels of John Fowles. Currently, she works at the
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philology as an Associate Professor.
Her research interests are mainly in the field of postmodern English and
American novel. She writes essays and articles concerning modern British
and American fiction. She also translates fiction from English, Spanish
and Greek into Serbian. She has published two books: Nature, Mystery,
Myth—the Novels of John Fowles and Voices and Silences. Apart from
English she speaks Spanish and Greek.
Božica JOVIĆ was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1976.
She had her BA of Arts in English Literature at the University of East
Sarajevo in 2001. She earned her MA in English Literature at the
University of Bergen, Norway, in 2004. From 2005 till 2011 she worked
as a Teaching Assistant at the English Department at the University of
East Sarajevo. She had her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University
of Belgrade in 2011. She is a Fulbright alumni, having spent nine months
researching at the Fulbright School of Arts and Sciences, the University of
Arkansas in 2009/2010. She currently holds the post of Assistant Professor
of English and American Literature at the English Department of the
University of East Sarajevo. She has also been engaged by the English
Department at the University of Banja Luka to teach for three semesters in
2012/2013.
Marija KRIVOKAPIĆ teaches 19th
- and 20th
-century British Literature at the
Faculty of Philology, University of Montenegro. Her publications focus on
the work on D. H. Lawrence (Lawrence in Italy, Belgrade 2000; Quest for
the Transcendent in D. H. Lawrence’s Prose, Nikšić, 2009, as well as a
dozen of other short publications), but her recent interest also include
contemporary Native American literature (co-authored with Sanja Runtić,
Suvremena književnost američkih starosjedilaca, Osijek, 2013), and travel
writing. Together with Aleksandra Nikčević-Batrićević, she co-edited a
series of monographs published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She
edited and co-edited a series of translations of British, Canadian, South
African, and Native American authors. She is the current general editor of
linguistics and literature journal Folia linguistica et litteraria. She was a
coordinator of an international project for the advancement of language
studies, SEEPALS 2010-2013, financed by the European Commission.
She has enjoyed Fulbright support for research in 2009 and 2015.

312
Tomislav KUNA was born in Osijek in 1985. After completing his
elementary and high school education in Valpovo, he enrolled at the
Faculty of Philosophy, at the University of Mostar in 2007 as a double
major in English language and literature and Archaeology. He completed
his Bachelor degree in 2010 and his Masters degree in 2012. Right after
receiving his Masters degree he enrolled in the post-graduate studies in
English language and literature as a single major. He is currently writing
his thesis in the field of English Modernism.
Denis KUZMANOVIĆ was born in Mostar in 1985. After completing his
elementary and high school education there, he enrolled at the Faculty of
Philosophy of the University of Mostar in 2005 as a double major in
English language and literature and Philosophy. He completed his
Bachelor degree in 2008 and his Master degree in 2010. He has been
employed as an assistant in the English language and literature department
at the Faculty of Philosophy in Mostar since 2011 and has enrolled in the
post-graduate studies in English language and literature as a single major.
He is currently researching and writing his doctorate thesis.
Branko MARIJANOVIĆ studied English and German at the University of
Zadar in Croatia and he finished his postgraduate studies at the University
of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is currently working on his
doctoral dissertation investigating the role of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the
development of the novel as a literary genre. He works as a secondary
school teacher and as a lecturer at the University of Mostar. He is
interested in literature, philosophy and movies, particularly in the
interrelations between civilization and evolution and in their influence on
modern day people. He has published a few articles and given a few
lectures exploring the mentioned topics.
Aleksandra NIKČEVIĆ-BATRIĆEVIĆ teaches courses on American
literature, American women poetry and feminist literary theory and
criticism at the University of Montenegro (Faculty of Philology,
Department of English Language and Literature). Her publications include
papers on Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, second wave feminism and other
American authors. She has initiated numerous projects in translation
(literary texts and literary theory). She is a member of the editorial board
of journals for language, literary and cultural studies.

Olivera POPOVIĆ is a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philology,
University of Montenegro. She teaches Italian literature and her
publications focus on theory and critics of travel writing. She collaborates
in an international project concerning interadriatic relationships—CISVA
(Centro Interuniversitario Internazionale di Studi sul Viaggio Adriatico).
Robert SULLIVAN was born in Ireland and educated at universities in
England (Leeds and Oxford), before taking his Ph.D. at Brown University
in the United States. He has taught in Algeria, Ghana, the United States,
and several universities in Europe. He is the author of two academic books
and numerous essays on literary criticism. Sullivan has been the recipient
of two Fulbright Scholar grants and three Fulbright Senior Specialist
grants. Currently he is a Visiting Fulbright Specialist at the University of
Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bavjola SHATRO is senior lecturer of Contemporary Albanian Literature
and World Literature of the Twentieth Century in Aleksandër Moisiu
University, Albania. She is author and co-author of 5 books in the field of
literary studies and has contributed with chapters in three volumes of
selected essays published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. She is co-
editor of a forthcoming volume of selected essays on English Language
and Literature that will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
She has published numerous articles and reviews in different peer-
reviewed journals in the U.S. and Europe and has presented papers at
dozens of international conferences around the world. She has a wide
academic experience as a researcher and lecturer in the U.S. and Europe,
too. Besides, she is Vice-President of South-East European Studies
Association (SEESA) USA
Vanja VUKIĆEVIĆ GARIĆ works at the University of Montenegro. She
teaches Literary Translation and various courses in English literature at the
Faculty of Philology and the English Language at the Faculty of
Philosophy. She has published many articles on the work of James Joyce,
modernism and postmodernism, contemporary British novel, whereas her
other academic interests also include the 19th English literature, gender
theories, Native American literature, as well as theory and philosophy of
translation.

314
Aleksandra ŽEŽELJ KOCIĆ holds a Ph.D. from the Faculty of Philology,
University of Belgrade. Her primary interest is Anglo-American
Modernism. She has been teaching the English Language and Literature at
Philological High School in Belgrade since 2004. She has published a
number of papers on diverse literary issues.

INDEX
A
Ackroyd, Peter, 224, 226, 227,
230
Aldridge, John W., 164
Arendt, Hannah, 188, 192, 193,
195
Aristotle, 106, 110, 111, 223
Arnold, Mathew, 36, 66, 67, 83
Ascham, Sir Roger, 296
Auden, Wystan Hugh, 99
Augustine, St., 44, 246, 247, 254
B
Bachelard, Gaston, 224, 228
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 146-148, 223
Balzac, Honoré de, 282, 300
Barnes, Julian, 107
Barth, Roland, 142
Bassi, Shaul, 301
Bataille, Georges, 151, 153, 154,
156, 158, 159
Baumeister, Roy F., 210, 211,
213, 214
Beegel, Suzan, 170
Bell, Milicent, 180
Benjamin, Walter, 207
Benson, Jackson J., 163
Berendt, John, 299, 301
Bhabha, Homi, 303
Bloom, Harold, 145, 146, 239
Bon, Gustave Le, 219
Bossuet, Jacques-Benigne, 239,
245, 246
Boym, Svetlana, 290
Brathwaite, Edward, 261, 170
Brecht, Bertolt, 107, 164, 165,
257, 259, 260
Brezhnev, Leonid, 193
Brooke, Rupert, 70, 72
Browning, Robert, 91, 110, 296,
301
Burgess, Anthony, 146
Butler, Judith, 164-166
Byron, George Gordon, 41, 46,
87, 170, 286, 296, 298-300
C
Calvino, Italo, 299
Camus, Albert, 251-253
Cawelti, John G., 16, 18, 21
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 258
Church, Benjamin, 17
Cicero, 254
Cirino, Mark, 167
Clark, William, 11
Cleckley, Hervey, 116
Cody, Buffalo Bill, 19, 23
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 48,
57, 107-110
Columbus, Christopher, 9
Cooper, James Fennimore, 18,
19
Crashaw, Richard, 43
Crevecoeur, John de, 12, 14
Curtis, Ariana, 301
Curtis, Daniel, 301
D
Daiches, David, 90
Dante, Alighieri, 41, 43, 45-47,
53-55, 57, 58, 63, 94, 191, 241,
242, 245, 246, 253, 295
Debray, Régis, 295
Dickens, Charles, 300
Drury, Shadia B., 238, 243
Dryden, John, 87, 258

Index
316
E
Eliot, Thomas Sterns, 87-103,
110, 142, 258
Elisabeth I, 239
Ellmann, Richard, 141
Esslin, Martin, 260
Eusebius, 240, 241
F
Fantina, Richard, 170
Fei, Alberto Toso, 301
Fetterley, Judith, 164, 180
Filmer, Robert, 239
Filson, John, 17, 18
Flaubert, Gustave, 107, 142
Foucault, Michel, 281
Fradinger, Moira, 265
Fremont, John C., 12, 13
Freud, Sigmund, 116, 224, 251
Fromm, Erich, 124
Frost, Robert, 69, 99, 110-112
Frye, Northrop, 241
Fugard, Athol, 266, 267, 270
G
Gibbs, James, 261
Gilbert, Helen, 260
Gilbert, Sandra, 170
Gilpin, William, 13
Goddard, Harold C., 238, 243,
254
Goethe, Wolfgang, 41, 223, 296,
300
Goff, Barbara, 270
Goldoni, Carlo, 294
Goldsworthy, Vesna, 286
Goya, Francisco, 170
Gramsci, Antonio, 281
Grenfell, Julian, 66, 73-75
Grey, Zane
Gubar, Suzan, 179
H
Hamilton, Alexander, 27
Hardy, Thomas, 66-71, 83, 155
Hazlitt, William, 248
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 87, 251-
253
Heidegger, Martin, 224-226,
228, 229, 231, 234
Hemingway, Ernest, 82, 163,
164, 166-180, 182, 300
Herbert, George, 128
Hobbes, Thomas, 27, 220
Holland, Patrick, 289
Homer, 47, 53, 58, 147, 258
Horace, 80, 81
Huggan, Graham, 289
Hughes, Ted, 258
Huxley, Aldous, 193
J
Jackson, Andrew, 12
James I, 240
James, Henry, 66, 295-299, 301
Jefferson, Thomas, 11-13, 15,
18, 22, 26, 27
Jezernik, Bozidar, 286
Johnson, Samuel, 110
Jong, Erica, 303
Joyce, James, 89, 95-97, 141-
148
Joyce, Stanislaus, 141, 142
Jung, Carl, 89
K
Kadare, Ismail, 187-207
Kafka, Franz, 206
Kani, John, 266, 267
Kant, Immanuel, 107, 223
Krleža, Miroslav, 101
L
L’Amour, Louis, 21

Larkin, Philip, 83
Wolf, Larry, 281-283
Lawrence, David Herbert, 151-
160, 179, 296
Lee, Harper, 250
Leed, Eric, 287
Lewis, Meriwether, 11
Lewis, Sinclair, 115-117
Limerick, Patricia, 24, 27
Lisle, Debbie, 289
Locke, John, 107
London, Jack, 93
Longfellow, Henry
Wadsworth, 296
Louis XIV, 238, 239
M
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 243, 244
Mandeville, Sir John, 296
Mann, Thomas, 302, 304-307
Marlowe, Christopher, 258
Marx, Karl, 202, 224, 251
Maurier, Daphne du, 229
May, Alan Le, 21
McEwan, Ian, 199
Melville, Herman, 296
Merwin, William Stanely, 105,
113
Michaels, Walter Benn, 32, 33,
35, 37
Millett, Kate, 152
Millon, Theodore , 124
Mills, Sarah, 287, 288
Milton, John, 43-50, 53-56, 58,
59, 63, 239, 251
Modigliani, Amedeo
Clemente, 300
Monet, Claude, 301
Morisseau-Leroy, Felix, 263,
265
N
Nabokov, Vladimir, 146
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 112
Ntshona, Winston, 266, 267
O
Orwell, George, 93, 187-189,
93, 94, 97, 99, 200, 201, 203-
207
Osofisan, Femi, 269, 270
Owen, Wilfred, 66, 76, 80, 82,
83, 179
P
Paxton, Frederic Logan, 24
Peck, H. Daniel, 31, 33-39
Philip II, 239
Pirandello, Luigi, 257, 259, 266
Piscator, Erwin, 258
Plato, 56, 223, 246, 248, 253
Polo, Marco, 295, 300
Pope, Alexander, 87, 111
Pope, Jessie, 66, 76-78, 80, 83
Pound, Ezra, 71, 74, 88-90, 99,
258, 296, 300
Pratt, Mary Louise, 281
Proust, Marcel, 296, 300
R
Radcliffe, Ann, 46
Reich, Wilhelm, 124
Reisner, Marc, 11, 14, 15
Remington, Frederic, 20
Reynolds, Michael, 172
Reynolds, Nedra, 225
Rhys, Jean, 107
Roosevelt, Theodore, 22, 23
Rosenberg, Isaac, 66, 70, 73, 74,
76, 83
Ross, Michael, 302
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27,
282, 300
Rowlandson, Mary, 16, 17
Rubinstein, Arthur, 300
Ruskin, John, 296

Index
318
S
Said, Edward, 141, 143-145,
280, 281, 283
Sand, George, 295
Sassoon, Siegfried, 66, 76, 79,
83
Schaefer, Jack, 21
Schiller, Friedrich, 45
Schwenger, Peter, 169
Scott, Walter, 18
Seaman, Owen, 66, 78, 79, 83
Sesiu, Sabata, 270, 271
Shakespeare, Willam, 93, 99,
111, 137, 147, 237-242, 248,
250, 252, 253, 255, 258, 296,
301, 302
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 41, 42,
44, 46-58, 63, 107-109, 296
Shelley, Mary, 41, 55, 63
Shklovsky, Viktor, 105, 106,
111
Showalter, Elaine, 172
Simić, Charles, 169
Slotkin, Richard, 10, 15-18, 21,
26
Smith, Henry Nash, 13, 14, 17,
23
Sophocles, 67, 260, 261, 263,
270, 275
Stael, Madame de, 300
Staub, Ervin, 209, 217-219
Stevens, Wallace, 105
Stoppard, Tom, 106
Stravinsky, Igor, 300
Strychacz, Thomas, 164, 166,
176
Swinburne, Richard, 253
T
Tennyson, Alfred, 89, 110, 258
Thoreau, Henry David, 31-40
Tiffin, Helen, 260
Tocqueville, Alex de, 12, 13
Todorova, Maria, 283-286
Tolstoy, Leo, 106
Tompkins, Joanne, 260
Turner, Frederic Jackson, 9. 19-
28
Tyler, Lisa, 170
V
Vasquez Coronado, Don
Francisco, 10
Vergil, 41
Vernon, Alex, 167, 176, 177,
180
Voltaire, François-Marie
Arouet, 282
W
Waller, James, 212
Walpole, Robert, 296
Waugh, Evelyn, 301
Webb, Walter Prescott, 24
Weisstein, Ulrich, 304
Wertheim, Albert, 268
Weyenberg, Astrid Van, 269,
270
Wharton, Edith, 301
Whitman, Walt, 84, 87
Wilber, Charles Dana, 12
Wister, Owen, 19, 20
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 113
Wordsworth, William, 39, 54,
87, 107, 108, 296
Wren, Christopher, 227, 228,
231
Y
Yeats, William Butler, 96, 216
Young, Philip, 164
Z
Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 193
Zorzi, Rossella Mamoli, 299

Antigone On The African Stage

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

More from Carrie Romero

More from Carrie Romero (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Antigone On The African Stage