Termine im Studiengang

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky (Universität Augsburg)

Im Rahmen des Interdisziplinären Kolloquiums der Masterschule Literaturwissenschaft von Prof. Dr. Christina Wald wird Frau prof. Dr. Katja Sarkowsky einen Gastvortrag halten mit dem Titel "When You Hold Captive the Dead, You Enslave the Living": Conflict, History, and the Dead in Beth Piatote's 'Antíkoni'.

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Im Folgenden noch ein kurzer Abstract zum Thema:

“Antíkoni” (2019), a play by the Nez Perce author and scholar Beth Piatote, is one of the most recent adaptations of Sophocles’ 442 BCE tragedy “Antigone”. “Antíkoni” uses the established structure of a conflict over the treatment of the dead to address the contemporary question of repatriation, that is, the return of Indigenous human remains from museums to tribal communities for burial; here, the dead are not the recently deceased but have been killed over a century ago. This historical perspective allows “Antíkoni” to connect repatriation to the history of colonization and debates about decolonization. At the same time, its formal modifications, e.g. of the chorus as a group of community elders telling Nez Perce stories, and its selective use of the Nez Perce language make it an exploration of the resonances between Greek tragedy and Indigenous storytelling. And finally, its ending raises the question of the affordances and the limits of ‘tragedy’ in different cultural contexts.

This talk will first frame the play in the context of Indigenous literatures addressing repatriation and Indigenous criticism of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), before turning to the ways in which the play’s adaption of Sophocles’ “Antigone” explores and modifies the possibilities of modern tragedy.