Untimely Greeks in the Caribbean: Greek and African Antiquities as a Time before Colonialism in Marcial Gala’s Call me Cassandra
By Cristina Pérez Díaz, Columbia University
In Marcial Gala’s 2019 novel, Llámenme Casandra (Call me Cassandra), Rauli, the first-person narrator, though born male, identifies as a woman; more specifically, as a reincarnation of Cassandra. When she is sent by the Cuban post-revolutionary government as a soldier to Angola, she reads her arrival to Africa as a return to the ancient world, that of the African gods as well as the Greek. She repeatedly refers to Africa as “the border with the Old World” (424).
From Conformity to Cultural Resistance: A new Heritage discourse in the Antigones of Mexico
By Andres Carrete, University of Texas at Austin
This presentation proposes a theoretical model for engaging with classical receptions which understands heritage as a living and dynamic cultural act. By exploring Sophocles’ Antigone and its multiple Mexican adaptations, it interrogates the specifically Mexican practice of adapting the Antigone and theorizes a reciprocal relation between the receiving communities and the play’s development as a marked cultural signifier of resistance in the country.
Hacking as a Methodology for Post-Colonial Studies in Haitian Literature
By Tom Hawkins, The Ohio State University
Scholars working with the legacies of the ancient Greco-Roman world continually wrestle with the question of what methodology best suits the analysis of material that appears in both colonial and anti-colonial discourses. As the title of my forthcoming monograph advertises, Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature uses the concept of hacking as the lens through which to study how Haitian authors have engaged ancient Greco-Roman material.