Medea in South Africa: Receptions of the Euripidean Tragedy from the 19th to the 21st Century

This project researches the reception of Euripides' Medea in translation, adaptation, and performance in South Africa from the mid-19th century to the present day in Black African, Afrikaner, British, and multicultural contexts spanning the colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid periods. Part of this project involves investigating the manner in which Greek Tragedy has been weaponised in British, and particularly Dutch, hegemonic colonialism, and the cultural reinforcement of nationalist Afrikaner identity.

It also examines the syncretisation of the myth of Medea with native Black South African mythology, narratology, history, and social reality. Of especial significance is the foregrounding of the narratives of migration, racial prejudice, and social, cultural, and ethnic exclusion in South African adaptations of the post-apartheid and new millennium era.

African performances of Ancient Greek tragedies are beginning to receive scholarly attention, but there remain significant gaps. I hope to engage with Fleishman and Mbothwe's ongoing Mellon-funded project, Reimagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South, which examines the postcolony through the frame of tragedy. Fleischmann and Reznek's radical production of Medea in 1994, the year of South Africa's transition to democracy, will be an important exemplum of post-apartheid theatre.

Alongside the innovative use of polyglottism to represent colonial and post-colonial identity, I will explore issues of repatriation in the symbolic and emotive use of the landscape, as in van Woensel, Bakker, and Topper's MedEia (1998), in which the audience walks through the set of a shantytown as the play progresses.

Methodologically, I will combine the approaches of performance studies with historicist contextualisation of the reception of Greek Tragedy in the socio-political, cultural, and academic realities in South Africa over the past 200-years. At the forefront of my research will be Black performance theory, including Young (2010); Rankine (2013); Luckett and Shaffer (2017); and Crémieux, Lemoine and Rocchi (2013), which uses Blackness as a theoretical lens for examining identity formation across disciplines.

Moreover, my analysis will be informed by decolonial and postcolonial theory, to examine the ideological shaping of power relations and identity in 'indigenous South African hybrid' drama.

My proposal is comprised of five provisional chapters, for which I will spend up to two terms researching each. Beginning in the 19th century, which saw the hardening of racialist and racist thinking, I will investigate the earliest recorded performances of Medea, burlesques, attended by British 'expatriates' in an insular, white supremacist community within the colony.

A second chapter will examine productions in translation for British colonial audiences in the 20th century, beginning with Thorndike's performances of the text of Murray. For this segment of research, I will consult Murray's correspondence with colleagues in South Africa, amongst the Murray Papers in the Bodleian Library, relating to the production of his plays and his responses to the Boer War.

The third chapter will focus on synthesising Afrikaans translations and performances, which were produced in an attempt to establish cultural prestige and status for their fledgling language. In a closely related fourth chapter, I will examine the role of Greek Tragedy and Classics in South African education and scholarship, frequently underpinned by colonial intents, with a particular focus on the study of Classics at Oxford by white South Africans on Rhodes Scholarships, and the work of Oxford-educated Classicists in South Africa, which contributed to the cultivation of racialist and segregationist attitudes.

In the final and most important chapter, I will devote attention to multilingual, multicultural, and multiracial performances of Medea during and after apartheid, centralising Black decolonising scholarship in my analys