Olga Faccani (UC Santa Barbara)
In my paper I will use an original course I taught for the Classics Department at UC Santa Barbara in Fall 2021, “Tragedy of Displacement: ancient theater and modern immigration, migration, and incarceration,” as a case study to discuss issues of activism, equality, and community-based learning in the classroom. The course taught students how to read themes of voluntary or forced displacement as they intersect with issues of trauma, gender, and identity in ancient Greek drama and contemporary adaptations. In doing so, the course also encouraged students to assess the benefits or shortcomings of thinking about modern issues through a classical lens, and questioned the role of the study of ancient performance in facilitating the development of reflective thinking and agency in the classroom.
Firstly, I will introduce some of the main topics covered by the course, such as US-Mexico border immigration, displacement as exile from community within US prisons, or the notion of “internal exile” as one of the barriers faced by many individuals after being released from prison as they struggle to reintegrate back into society. As part of the course, students read ancient texts and modern reinterpretations, such as Luis Alfaro’s adaptation of Medea, Mojada, and Harrison David Rivers’ adaptation of Trojan Women, And She Would Stand Like This, as well as secondary scholarship such as Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete? and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity, intended to foster the students’ critical thinking and engagement with modern day issues. Secondly, I will focus on discussion topics that emerged in the classroom, such as the extent to which ancient Greek theater informs our lives today, from a social, political and cultural perspective, and how issues of gender and identity intersect with themes of displacement in ancient and contemporary dramatizations.
I will conclude my paper with a discussion of changes introduced to the curriculum in order to facilitate community-based learning and the co-creation of knowledge in the classroom. As part of the course, I prioritized collaborations and partnerships with marginalized communities, in order to bring excluded voices into my teaching, and I invited guest speakers in my class such as the Vice Chair of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, or the founder of Underground Scholars at UC Santa Barbara, an organization committed to building a prison-to-school pipeline through recruitment, retention, and advocacy. Students incorporated reflections that stemmed from these participations in their final papers, and had the option to write a short play instead of a research paper and produce an original re-interpretation of one of the tragedies analyzed in class.