How to approach the vast and innovative re-writing of Antigone in Latin America?

How to approach the vast and innovative re-writing of Antigone in Latin America?
Date
Fri April 27th 2018, 12:30 - 1:20pm
Event Sponsor
Center for Latin American Studies, Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures
Location
Bolivar House, 582 Alvarado Row, Stanford, CA
Speaker:

Professor Moira Fradinger, Latin American Perspective Lecturer, 2017-18

Rather than taking recourse to the more common critical gesture of comparing/contrasting “postcolonial”Antigones to ancient or modern European ones, I have chosen to consider the more than 30 vernacular Antigonas as a corpus with its specific internal dynamics. In this talk, I will identify a surprising pattern emerging from the study of these works: ever since the 19th century, Antigone has been characterized as a mother, thus transforming motherhood into a political metaphor. As we enter the 21st century, however, rebel mothers gradually become rebel sisters or female collectives, thereby critiquing the violence historically directed not only against the community at large, but also against women in particular. I will focus on examples from Argentina, Haiti, Brasil, Perú, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia and Chile.

Professor Moira Fradinger is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Her teaching has focused on European and Latin American literature, film and intellectual history of the 20th century, as well as gender studies and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP 2010) and has recently finished a manuscript on Antigona in Latin America, and a translated anthology of five Antigone-plays from Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole into English. Her current research project is on gender debates in Argentina.

Professor Fradinger is teaching ILAC 236: Gender and Feminist Debates in Latin America, in Spring 2018. The course dates are Monday, April 23 to Wednesday April, 25, 6:00-9:00pm in Bolivar House.

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