Antígonas: Writing from Latin America

Winner of the 2024 American Comparative Literature Association René Wellek Prize for best book in the field, Moira Fradinger’s Antígonas: Writing from Latin America is an extraordinary achievement in archival research and scholarly rigor. The book assembles a corpus of almost eighty dramatic texts written between 1824 and 2015 that strategically “dismember” and “cannibalize” fragments of the Sophoclean Antigone myth insofar as they can be made useful for working through local events and problems that emerge in times of (neo-)colonial capitalism. Fradinger provides a meticulously close reading of many of the plays in this corpus, with special attention paid to texts from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico. She argues that these works produce their own vernacular Antígonas that, when read together, reveal transnational patterns of rumination on themes of motherhood and sisterhood, corpses and burials. These patterns, in turn, illuminate a shared imagination and theorization of the necropolitical (neo-)colony and its major periods of development in Latin America as well as an increasing demand in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century for another kind of politics and for universal, systemic change.Most chapters focus on one or two plays that are historicized principally—though not exclusively—within local and national traditions. Readers might accordingly be tempted to treat this massive work as a kind of encyclopedia or sourcebook, selectively reading the sections most aligned with their own research interests and expertise. This would be a mistake for at least two reasons. First, such an approach would obscure how the book’s chronologically organized chapters work together to showcase major shifts and transformations in Antígona’s portrayal, role on stage, and relationship with others. Fradinger’s painstaking efforts to pursue South–South comparison across time and space, to put different Antígonas in dialogue with each other, would thus be lost. Second, and perhaps even more important, Fradinger advances a uniquely anticolonial reading protocol that can only be truly appreciated when the book is considered in its entirety. The introduction presents the basics of this mode of reading, but it is developed, nuanced, and refined in every chapter. Fradinger achieves this not only by theorizing how to read in an anticolonial way but also by practicing or performing this kind of reading to elaborate her interpretation of the book’s corpus. And yet, Fradinger’s reading protocol is not necessarily specific or limited to its object of study (i.e., Antígona plays). It therefore can serve as a kind of model for future scholarship within, between, and beyond the fields of Classical Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, and Latin American Studies. Indeed, this is where the book’s broad appeal lies, why it could serve as a resource for anyone interested in these and related fields of study. Along with the comprehensive treatment of its subject matter, Antígonas is a primer for scholars and students who want or need to take up the practice of anticolonial reading.With polemical zeal, Fradinger excoriates traditional reception theory scholarship insofar as it reduces Latin American cultural production in general, and Antígona plays in particular, to adaptations or rewritings of ancient and modern European sources. This constitutes, for Fradinger, a (neo-)colonial operation of abstracting the Latin American text from its historical conditions of production, the local context in which it is materially embedded, so that it can be converted into yet another reflection of Europe. But what if—as Fradinger insists—European myths and writings are not automatically conceived as original sources, as “points of departure” for Latin American cultural production? What if, on the contrary, classical and contemporary European texts are conceived as “points of arrival,” as material that Latin American cultural producers freely and irreverently manipulate and transform when doing so allows them to better speak to and intervene in their own historical conjunctures, the local contexts that function as the actual sources and points of departure for their works? This dialectical inversion of (neo-)colonial reading protocols opens new possibilities for interpretation: What is at stake is not reception but cannibalization, not foreign Antigone plays traveling to Latin America but vernacular Antígona plays written from Latin America. For anyone who has studied Brazilian poet and critic Oswald de Andrade’s “Cannibalist Manifesto” (1928)—cited in epigraph form at the beginning of Fradinger’s book—this will sound like a familiar argument. Yet it is unclear that the sweeping consequences of such an argument have been generally understood and acted upon either inside or outside of U.S. academia, for (neo-)colonial modes of reading often remain the norm. Fradinger’s book thus represents an opportunity to start again, to disrupt old and deeply ingrained patterns of thinking with new (as well as not-so-new but still urgent and timely) alternatives.What this means for the book’s central case study is that Antígona is presented as a thoroughly American character (in the sense of Nuestra América, the América of José Martí, who is the other author cited in epigraph form at the beginning of the book). It follows that Antígona is a character with her own concerns and her own themes that need not be constantly measured against the “gold standard,” set by certain European interpreters, of an “Ur-Antigone.” Here Fradinger principally has in mind Hegel and the Hegelian legacy of reading Greek antiquity, which is often mechanically applied as a framework for interpreting vernacular Antígona plays. Fradinger’s aim, however, is not to critique Hegel’s conceptualization of Antigone—this has been done many times before with varying success—but rather to signal its irrelevance for understanding Antígona. Indeed, for Fradinger, the book’s corpus defies Hegelian expectations insofar as (1) Antígona is not prepolitical but rather decidedly political; (2) her core relationship is not that of sister–brother but rather that of mother–child and/or sister–sister; and (3) she does not act qua individual across the public/private or state/family opposition but rather intervenes in communal and collective spheres of politics and is often herself multiple, such that it is possible to speak of many Antígonas appearing on the same stage.Stalwart Hegel scholars may not find the book’s summation of this German philosopher and his understanding of the Greek heroine very compelling or satisfying. Perhaps because I am not part of this camp, I ultimately had a different response, one not rooted in the desire to develop yet another interpretation of Hegel’s Antigone. Instead, I was struck by what felt like a tension or discontinuity between the book’s own theory and practice of reading and its treatment of Hegel and his legacy. I was left pondering questions that the book never fully addressed but that nonetheless emerged from and were inspired by what I found to be most compelling about its argument, questions like: Is it possible and even desirable to cannibalize Hegel? Does he offer useful material—when digested and transformed—for the interpretation of Antígona? Can the effort to correct mechanical applications of a certain Hegelian framework inadvertently overcorrect, foreclosing in advance more creative approaches to this framework and its author? Reading Antígonas against the grain, it is possible to answer “yes” to all three of these questions. There is, in my view, ample evidence of Fradinger dismembering Hegel and suturing fragments of his body of thought with “homegrown reading strategies” to pursue an emphatically dialectical mode of argumentation. When this occurs, Hegel is actually shown to be very relevant, so long as—in cannibalist fashion—he is read against himself or against the legacy of his more mechanical interpreters.By way of conclusion, I would like to qualify a point that I made previously. While it is true that Fradinger’s anticolonial mode of reading can be disentangled from her object of study, the two are nevertheless deeply intertwined. This is because Antígona plays often mobilize their protagonist to denounce the (neo-)colony’s very condition of possibility, which is the production of corpses. As Fradinger reminds us through her reading of these plays, the necropolitical basis of the (neo-)colony has persisted throughout the history of Latin America, from the dispossession and extermination of Indigenous communities to the coercion and torture of enslaved Africans to the massacre and forced disappearance of Leftist militants and students to widespread forms of gendered violence, including rampant femicide. Yet this seemingly endless onslaught is not destined to eternally recur. Fradinger identifies “quilting points” where the tragic is woven together with the utopian, and Antígonas raise their collective voices to demand the impossible. Refusing negotiation, they call for the kind of change that cannot occur within the existing coordinates of (neo-)colonial capitalism and would thus put the entire system into crisis. Whereas early Antígona plays are often bound up with the patriarchal nation, which requires sacrifice for the universal redemption of its imagined community, the corpus gradually breaks with this paradigm to articulate a different type of universal, one that can only be realized by a genuinely new order, the formation of a social bond that does not depend upon the corpse. When this paradigm shift occurs, the Antígonas on stage join their sisters and comrades off stage, who demonstrate, march, organize, and strike around impossible-universal slogans like Aparición con Vida (Life Back), Ni Una Menos (Not One Less), and Vivas Nos Queremos (We Want Us Alive). Fradinger’s Antígonas both shines light on and participates in this ongoing encounter between aesthetics and politics, the theater and the streets, culture and revolution. It is essential reading for anyone ready to think, act, and learn from Latin America in an effort to build another world.