Postcolonial Tragedy: Forms of Resistance (Christina Wald)
The project investigates how Greek and Shakespearean tragedies are transformed in erstwhile British colonies in Africa. Disseminated by the colonial education system meant to implement British values and to fortify colonial power, the ‘Western’ texts were in turn performed and rewritten for specific local concerns, often with the aim of reflecting on and subverting colonial authority. In this regard, postcolonial tragedy is a form of political resistance that aesthetically merges Western texts and theatrical traditions, indigenous theatrical forms (often syncretized by colonialism and globalization) as well as previous African rewritings of Western tragedies, thus using more sources of formal innovation than the postcolonial ‘writing back’ paradigm has suggested.
Comparing rewritings of ancient Greek and Shakespearean tragedy, the project tests the hypothesis that Shakespearean tragedy is a more flexible and open form than Greek tragedy, which facilitates glocal African adaptations. On the other hand, it has an even more problematic postcolonial heritage than Greek tragedy because Shakespeare as ‘national poet’ and ‘English genius’ has been employed more fiercely than ancient Greek tragedy to legitimize British colonialism. It is in the context of this productive tension that postcolonial tragedy will be discussed as an aesthetic form of political resistance and that questions about the persistence and transformation of tragedy as traveling form in a multidirectional, globalized literary network will be investigated.