Product Description

In this groundbreaking book, Tina Chanter challenges the philosophical and psychoanalytic reception of Sophocles Antigone, which has largely ignored the issue of slavery. Drawing on textual and contextual evidence, including historical sources, she argues that slavery is a structuring theme of the Oedipal cycle, but one that has been written out of the record. Chanter focuses in particular on two appropriations of Antigone: The Island, set in apartheid South Africa, and Tgnni, set in nineteenth-century Nigeria. Both plays are inspired by the figure of Antigone, and yet they rework her significance in important ways that require us to return to Sophocles original play and attend to some of the motifs that have been marginalized. Chanter explores the complex set of relations that define citizens as opposed to noncitizens, free men versus slaves, men versus women, and Greeks versus barbarians. moves beyond the narrow confines critics have inherited from German idealism to reinvigorate debates over the meaning and significance of Antigone, situating it within a wider argument that establishes the salience of slavery as a structuring theme. Readers will learn a great deal from this beautiful, impassioned, and erudite book. Mary Beth Mader, author of