Indigenous Voices and Classical Literature

Cherríe Moraga's The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (1995, 2001), reinvents the original character as a Chicana lesbian, outcast in a near-future dystopia in which the former U.S. territory has been divided along racial and ethnic lines. Unlike Euripides' Medea, Moraga's plot is something of a ghost story, with the murderous mother wandering mentally from her present existence in an asylum and the other characters effectively haunting her.

Efua Sutherland is a singular figure in twentieth-century Ghanaian cultural history, responsible for the establishment of the Ghana Drama Studio, the Ghana Society of Writers, and the Ghana Experimental Theatre.

In 1931-1932, while imprisoned in Zomba Central prison in colonial Nyasaland, George Simeon Mwase (c.1880-1962) composed an account of the anti-colonial uprising led by John Chilembwe in January 1915 (published posthumously as Mwase 1967). Mwase’s account defies easy characterization: part biography of John Chilembwe, part self-reflexive memoir, part statement of Nyasa nationhood, and part commentary on the history of race relations between white and black in the Nyasaland Protectorate.

Irish independence from Britain, ratified in 1922 with the creation of the Irish Free State comprising twenty-six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties, was accompanied in the decades that followed by a surge of publications in the Irish language, including numerous translations of classical literature and of materials for teaching Greek and Latin.