Classics and the Atlantic Triangle: Caribbean Readings of Greece and Rome via Africa

Greenwood, Emily

doi:10.1093/fmls/40.4.365

Cited by 25 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In "Classics and the Atlantic Triangle," Greenwood (2004) argues that the triangle trade between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean continues to provide a basic outline for interaction, but the modern flows are of cultural influence, rather than goods and people.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

Zapkin¹

2022

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This essay utilizes Helen Tiffin’s idea of canonical counter-discourse to read the Medusa poems of Shara McCallum and Dorothea Smartt, two female Caribbean poets. Essentially, canonical counter-discourse involves authors rewriting works or giving voice to peripheral/silenced characters from the literary canon to challenge inequalities upheld by power structures such as imperialism and patriarchy. McCallum’s and Smartt’s poems represent Medusa to reflect their own concerns as women of color from Jamaica and Barbados, respectively. McCallum’s “Madwoman as Rasta Medusa” aligns the titular character from her book Madwoman with Medusa to express Madwoman’s righteous anger at the “wanton” and “gravalicious” ways of a Babylon addressed in second person. Smartt’s series of Medusa poems from Connecting Medium explore the pain of hair and skin treatments Black women endure to try and meet Euro-centric beauty standards, as well as the struggles of immigrants, particularly people of color. Both poets claim Medusa as kindred, empowering Medusa as a figure with agency—which she is denied in the Greco-Roman sources—and simultaneously legitimizing both Caribbean literature and the poets’ feminist and post-colonial protests by linking them to the cultural capital of the classics.

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

Zapkin¹

2022

Humanities

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This, she argues, could inadvertently produce the impression that the classical works have an unproblematic 'meaning' which can be extracted from the ancient context and be neatly reproduced within different cultural environments, implying that 'ancient culture was dead but might be retried and reapplied provided that one had the necessary training' (Hardwick, 2003: 2-3). 4 Criticising the term 'reception' commonly used in classical reception studies in a manner that is comparable to my hesitation about 'adaptation', however, Emily Greenwood (2004) writes that…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This, she argues, could inadvertently produce the impression that the classical works have an unproblematic ‘meaning’ which can be extracted from the ancient context and be neatly reproduced within different cultural environments, implying that ‘ancient culture was dead but might be retried and reapplied provided that one had the necessary training’ (Hardwick, 2003: 2–3). 4 Criticising the term ‘reception’ commonly used in classical reception studies in a manner that is comparable to my hesitation about ‘adaptation’, however, Emily Greenwood (2004) writes that[r]eception studies tends to simplify complex cultural relationships, as it is all too easy to envisage the relationship between different cultures as a linear trajectory between two poles. This makes for suspiciously neat narratives that chart the flow of ‘influences’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Lowenthal, 1972: 126) were criticised as trapped in the same binaries and dialectics as the Western colonising forces (cf., for instance, Bernabé and Confiant, 1990: 888). Emily Greenwood (2004) further summarises that ‘[o]ne of the complaints made against negritude is that it manages to be simultaneously Eurocentric and Afrocentric, but fails to be “Caribbean” (yet negritude is not sufficiently African for many African intellectuals, such as the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka)’ (p. 374).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Resurrecting antiquity: Memories of Medea in the Caribbean

Scherer

2019

Memory Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article maps out some of the ways in which classical antiquity is remembered in Caribbean theatre. Specifically, it discusses the refiguration of the ancient Medea myths within two plays by Steve Carter and José Triana, Pecong and Medea in the Mirror. In both plays, memories of Medea’s story are interwoven into religious rituals native to the authors’ own environments, whereby echoes of ancient characters, narratives and themes become part of the Caribbean cultural landscape. Through the narrative structure of these staged rituals, as well as the plays’ wider concerns with displacement, gender, class and race, both playwrights draw parallels between antiquity and modern Cuba and Trinidad; parallels in which the plays decontextualise narratives and characters from Graeco-Roman myths to tell stories specific to twentieth-century Caribbean islands. This article therein analyses the competitive framework that exists between memories of the classical, European canon and local Caribbean cultural environments.

show abstract

Bibliography

2007

A Companion to Classical Receptions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Classics and the Atlantic Triangle: Caribbean Readings of Greece and Rome via Africa

Cited by 25 publications

References 0 publications

Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

Petrifyin’: Canonical Counter-Discourse in Two Caribbean Women’s Medusa Poems

Resurrecting antiquity: Memories of Medea in the Caribbean

Bibliography

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About