Elke Nash, University of New Hampshire
Medea seems an endlessly generative figure for scholars and artists alike who desire to think through issues of identity and whose work highlights tensions around, for example, gender dynamics, race and racialization, immigration, and asylum, as well as settler-colonization and its attendant ideologies, mechanisms, and relationships. Often those who attend to such readings identify as a member of one (or multiple) such marginalized group(s); some position their work as a means by which to bring their own experience and that of others like them into contact with a tradition that has historically been unwelcoming. So, for example, describing his motivation to adapt Athenian tragedies for the modern stage, Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro asks, “How are we part of the classics, too?” (Pollack-Pelzner 2019), and certainly there is no dearth of adaptations that showcase Medea’s adaptability to modern and urgent issues of, in particular, race and empire, as evidenced by plays by Alfaro and Cherríe Moraga and by Kevin J. Wetmore’s volume, Black Medea (2013). In addition, recent scholarship on Medea and her receptions has explored similar themes; most recently, Clare Kearns (2023) has brought Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea into productive conversation with its Senecan predecessor, reading the latter through the lens of Indigeneity (for which, Arvin 2015; see, too, Ewans and Johnson 2019).
This paper continues such conversations through an examination of Euripides’ Medea which takes inspiration from Frantz Fanon’s concepts of “colonial” and “emancipatory violence” in order to read Medea as a figure whose actions might be understood as unavoidable, given her own experience as a non-Greek woman who has left her home, at times with an element of force. Indeed, certain Medea adaptations have been explicitly identified as “Fanonian” (cf., Wetmore 2013, 9, on Magnuson’s African Medea); I argue that such an identification is already previewed by the Euripides’ text itself, through, in particular, Medea’s configuration as foreign (e.g., Med. 13, 252-8, 441-5) and, importantly, powerless (e.g., 739-40), the totality of her vengeance, and the nature of her escape, and I argue that Euripides’ final image of Medea might be seen as one of Fanonian self-(re)invention.
Furthermore, via Medea’s experience, this paper delves deeper into “emancipatory violence” as a concept. On the one hand, Medea experiences liberation, from punitive measures at least – is this Fanon’s “emancipatory”? – although to be sure her actions accrue for Medea a certain bodily trauma which she cannot easily outrun (Angelopoulou 2022), which itself, I argue, speaks to the ongoing and inescapable harm of the colonial enterprise. On the other hand, Medea’s emancipatory violence, if we choose to read it as such, is liberating for her alone (at least within the drama), and to my mind, given the Athenian context, the question remains whether “empire” suffers any long-term consequences or whether, in fact, her violence is perceived as a by-product of imperial expansion, i.e., a cost worth paying. However, I suggest that this seeming inability to read the figure of Medea definitively is not actually at odds with Fanon’s own attitude towards violence, which is more complex than many critics allow (Butler 2015). Ultimately, this paper seeks neither to justify nor denounce Medea’s violence, but rather explores with further nuance Medea’s own positionality as seen within ancient Greek traditions as well as the implications of her representation within the context of Athenian imperialism.