Crossroads in the Black Aegean is a compendious, timely, and fascinating study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy. It consists of detailed readings of six dramas and one epic poem, from different locations across the African diaspora. Barbara Goff and Michael Simpson ask why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle figure so prominently among the tragedies adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past, in the inexorable curse of Oedipus and the regressive obsession of Antigone, can articulate the postcolonial moment. Capitalizing on classical reception studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative literature, Crossroads in the Black Aegean co-ordinates theory and theatre. It crucially investigates how the plays engage with the 'Western canon', and shows how they use their self-consciously literary status to assert, ironize, and challenge their own place, and that of the Greek originals, in relation to that tradition. Beyond these oedipal reflexes, the adaptations offer alternative African models of cultural transmission.

A study of African rewritings of Greek tragedy, this title asks why the plays of Sophocles' Theban Cycle are so often adapted by dramatists of African descent, and how plays that dilate on the power of the past can articulate the postcolonial moment.

The historical and cultural space of the Black Atlantic - a diasporic world of forced and voluntary migrations - has long provided fertile ground for the construction and reconstruction of new forms of classicism. From the aftermath of slavery up to the present day, black authors, intellectuals, and artists in the Atlantic world have shaped and reshaped the cultural legacies of classical antiquity in a rich variety of ways in order to represent their identities and experiences and reflect on modern conceptions of race, nation, and identity. The studies presented in this volume range across the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone worlds, including literary studies of authors such as Derek Walcott, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Junot Díaz, biographical and historical studies, and explorations of race and classicism in the visual arts. They offer reflections on the place of classicism in contemporary conflicts and debates over race and racism, and on the intersections between classicism, race, gender, and social status, demonstrating how the legacies of ancient Greece and Rome have been used to buttress racial hierarchies, but also to challenge racism and Eurocentric reconstructions of antiquity.

Sophocles' Antigone has been staged all over the world, and many of these productions have reconceived and remade the play to address local issues and concerns. This collection of essays explores the play's reception in numerous countries, as diverse as The Congo and Australia, Argentina and Japan.

The appearance of Martin Bernal's Black Athena: The Afro-Asian Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987 sparked intense debate and controversy in Africa, Europe, and North America. His detailed genealogy of the 'fabrication of Greece' and his claims for the influence of ancient African and Near Eastern cultures on the making of classical Greece, questioned many intellectuals' assumptions about the nature of ancient history. The transportation of enslaved African persons into Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean, brought African and diasporic African people into contact in significant numbers with the Greek and Latin classics for the first time in modern history. In African Athena, the contributors explore the impact of the modern African disapora from the sixteenth century onwards on Western notions of history and culture, examining the role Bernal's claim has played in European and American understandings of history, and in classical, European, American and Caribbean literary production. African Athena examines the history of intellectuals and literary writers who contested the white, dominant Euro-American constructions of the classical past and its influence on the present. Martin Bernal has written an Afterword to this collection.

Classical Memories is an intervention into the field of adaptation studies, taking the example of classical reception to show that adaptation is a process that can be driven by and produce intertextual memories. I see ‘classical memories’ as a memory-driven type of adaptation that draws on and reproduces schematic and otherwise de-contextualised conceptions of antiquity and its cultural ‘exports’ in, broadly speaking, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These memory-driven adaptations differ, often in significant ways, from more traditional adaptations that seek to either continue or deconstruct a long-running tradition that can be traced back to antiquity as well as its canonical points of reception in later ages. When investigating such a popular and widespread set of narratives, characters, and images like those that remain of Graeco-Roman antiquity, terms like ‘adaptation’ and ‘reception’ could and should be nuanced further to allow us to understand the complex interactions between modern works and classical antiquity in more detail, particularly when it pertains to postcolonial or post-digital classical reception. In Classical Memories, I propose that understanding certain types of adaptations as intertextual memories allows us to do just that.

Introduction: Black classicism in the American empire -- Phillis Wheatley and the affairs of state -- In plain sight: slavery and the architecture of democracy -- Ancient history, American time: Charles Chesnutt and the sites of memory -- Crumbling into dust: conjure and the ruins of empire -- National monuments and the residue of history