In my dissertation I examine how adaptations of Greek tragedy in South Africa after the fall of apartheid (1994) address the transitional stage of the country and mediate in the formation and apprehension of post-apartheid national identities and the formation of a new communitas. Drawing particularly from Raymond Williams and Jean-Pierre Vernant, I approach tragedy as a paradigmatic model for analyzing the dialectical relationship between cultural text and social context. The examination of this paradigm in the context of post-apartheid South Africa is grounded in postcolonial theory defined as an ongoing project of addressing the politics of identity representation in conjunction with the underlying conditions of cultural and material inequalities in a neo-colonial context.
I am focusing on three plays that provide distinct perspectives on the problem of national identity in the post-apartheid era and distinct artistic approaches to the process of adaptation. My examination of each play consists of two, interrelated parts: in the first part, I conduct a structural analysis of the text and an examination of the ways it relates to and reworks the major themes and concepts of the Greek tragedy it adapts. In the second part, I examine the connections between the country’s dominant discourses on national identities and the plays’ representations of these.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/19235 |
| Date | 03 March 2010 |
| Creators | Stathaki, Aktina |
| Contributors | Quayson, Ato |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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