An essay by Professor of Comparative Literature Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz was recently published in the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas. “Afrocentrism or Assimilation: The Case of Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth” appears as a chapter in a section on “The Search for the Omni-Americas (1970s-2013).”
Rabinowitz’s essay discusses the ways references to tragedy may have contradictory effects in a work of art. Dove’s play, set in the antebellum South, was based on the Oedipus myth. Slavery acts as the irrational fate in the original myth.
Publisher Oxford University Press calls The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas “the first edited collection to discuss the performance of Greek drama across the continents and archipelagos of the Americas from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present.” The book is part of the Oxford Handbooks in Classics and Ancient History series.
