Assistant Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner recently published an article in the edited volume Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage, from Bloomsbury Academic. “Antigone Undead: Tragedy and Biopolitics in Perla de la Rosa’s Antígona: las voces que incendian el desierto” appears in a section on “The Caribbean and North America.”
Weiner said that in Antígona: las voces que incendian el desierto (2004), de la Roas adapts Antigone to address el feminicidio (the femicide), or serial violence against women in Juárez, Mexico. He said this adaptation of Sophocles’ play continues a long multinational and multicultural tradition that reaches forward from Sophocles to include the Antigones of Jean Anouilh and Bertolt Brecht, as well as philosophical interpretations of the Antigone tradition by such modern thinkers as Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler.
According to Weiner, “This tradition understands Antigone as a liminal figure who inhabits a space between two deaths, a symbolic and a real one. Drawing upon this rich tradition of undead Antigones, this essay reads symbolic death in de la Rosa’s Antígona through Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics, which offer a powerful framework for approaching not only the Antigone myth but also some of the most critical issues and humanitarian crises of modernity.”
