As a slew of books, articles and creative works stand as testament, the past decades have seen ever-expanding interest in classical reception in Latin America as well as a compulsion to wrestle with the politics of Classics, classical reception and their colonial/postcolonial history and legacies in non-Eurocentric contexts. As part of this trend, recent years have seen a virtual explosion in scholarship dedicated to Francophone, Hispanophone and Lusophone receptions in the Americas. Two recent books, Fradinger’s Antígonas: Writing from Latin America (2023) and Hawkins’s Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature (2024), make meaningful and welcome contributions to this growing body of work on localised receptions of Greek and Roman culture and their cultural, historical and political contexts. Contemporary geopolitical developments may also affect our understanding of and approaches to Latin America and its historical and contemporary relationships with Greek and Roman classics. As Fradinger (p. 353) notes, there has been an ‘unprecedented flood of Antígona plays’ throughout the region (also described as an ‘avalanche’ on p. 355; cf. R. Pianacci, Antígona: una tragedia latinoamericana [2015]) that continues to enrich these books’ material, albeit in complex and difficult contexts. On the theme of race and colonial history, Hawkins notes (pp. 8–9) that neoclassical elements of the Palais Sans-Souci in Haiti (completed in 1813) have variously been viewed ‘(negatively) as a desperate effort to imitate French neoclassical culture or (positively) as an attempt to decouple neoclassicism from European whiteness’.

Fradinger’s monograph offers essays dedicated to Juan Cruz Varela’s Argia (1824), Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez (1951), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn an Kreyòl (1953), Jorge Andrade’s Pedreira das almas (1957) and As Confrarias (1969), Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Antígona Pérez (1968), an ‘Interlude’ on ‘Lesser-Known Mid-Century Plays’, Griselda Gambaro’s iconic Antígona Furiosa (1986), Yuyachkani’s and José Watanabe’s ‘Peruvian Ismene’ version of Antígona (2000), followed by an epilogue surveying twenty-first-century adaptations and social issues.

Following an introductory chapter spanning the years 1804–1822, Hawkins dedicates chapters to Jean-Pierre Boyer’s letter to Greek revolutionaries (1822), Émeric Bergeaud’s Stella (1859), Anténor Firmin’s De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (1885), Fernand Hibbert’s Romulus (1908), Jean Price-Mars’s Ansi Parla l’Oncle (1928), Félix Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn en Creole (1953), Morisseau-Leroy’s Wa Kreyon (1978), Dany Laferrière’s Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000) and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998; Hawkins co-authored this chapter with Julia Nelson Hawkins). As is the way of such volumes, both books invoke multiple other works in their discussions of the primary texts of focus. Hawkins includes several historical ‘Segues’, very helpful for those who might find a crash course in Haitian history of use.

Hawkins’s introduction deftly frames the importance and stakes of his project. As he writes (p. 1), ‘the importance of Haiti in anticolonial history is too rarely acknowledged and understood’, and the early date of the Haitian revolution forged a new project in anti-racist and anti-slavery statehood. The introduction continues to make explicit the important tensions inherent in Haitian and other receptions of ancient Greece and Rome as the ‘patrimony of European civilization’ (p. 2). Hawkins (pp. 3, 236) draws upon Audre Lorde’s iconic claim that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ as a launching point to think through the dynamics and politics of classical reception in postcolonial contexts (cf. J. Weiner, ‘The Master’s Tools?: Towards a Politics of Reception’, in: A. Bakogianni and L. Unceta Gómez [edd.], Classical Reception [2024]). In my reading, Hawkins’s explanation of his choice of the term ‘hacking’ (pp. 4–5) beautifully elucidates these tensions. In a preliminary section devoted to material culture, as well as a rich discussion of a multitude of reworkings of Caesar’s iconic veni, vidi, vici in hip hop and Haitian art, Hawkins concludes (p. 12) that ‘such classical forms now exist to be hacked – reformulated and repurposed – by creative artists across an array of new eras and social contexts’. Hawkins doubly invokes both the meaning of ‘hacking’ as signalling ‘transgressive, innovative’ and transformational technological explorations and, quoting from the Haitian-American artist Mark Bamuthi Joseph’s Scourge, the word’s more literal violent sense with ties to the sugar cane industry (p. 4). Similarly, Fradinger summons (p. 5) José Martí’s ‘famous 1891 line – “our Greece is preferable to the Greece that is not ours”’ – to signal a focus on ‘plays that dismember fragments’ of the Antigone myth. Fradinger also suggests (pp. 242–3) that certain Latin American receptions of the past century ‘cannibalize’ Antigone. In this sense, both volumes at their outset signal at once the inheritance of ancient Mediterranean culture and the value assigned to it with the constructions of ‘Europe’ and ‘Western Civilization’ as well as violent dynamics in which the authors’ ‘New World’ case studies perform interventions and interruptions upon their Greek and Roman. source material. My quotation marks around ‘Europe’, ‘Western Civilization’ and ‘New World’ intentionally follow Fradinger’s careful and explicit aim to approach such things and places as ‘ideological construction[s]’ (p. 2 n. 3; p. 3 n. 6).

Both volumes adopt a primarily diachronic approach in their structures. Following the introduction (‘Our América, Our Antígona’), Antígonas opens with an ‘Overture’ dedicated to the Argentinian Juan Cruz Varela’s tragedy Argia (1824), the influences of which Fradinger traces back to Vittorio Alfieri’s Polinice (1775) and Antigone (1776; p. 56). Fradinger closes with a ‘Finale’, a survey of contemporary works and productions, entitled ‘We are all Antígonas on the Twenty-First-Century Stage’. While the format and content are tailored for this monograph, I find that Fradinger’s ‘Finale’ builds upon her earlier ‘Nomadic Antigone’ prologue to Feminist Readings of Antigone (ed. F. Söderbäck [2010]) and the appendix to Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage (edd. E.B. Mee and H.P. Foley [2011]), to which Fradinger was a major contributor. The emphasis of Fradinger’s chronologically arranged chapters in between falls upon the second half of the twentieth century, the foci of which span Leopoldo Marechal’s Antígona Vélez (1951, Argentina) to the 2000 Peruvian collaboration between the poet José Watanabe and the theatre collective Yuyachkani. The intervening chapters delve into iconic Antígonas, such as Luís Rafael Sánchez’s Antígona Pérez (1968, Puerto Rico) and Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa (1986, Argentina). However, Fradinger carefully situates these case studies within the much broader Antigone tradition and corpus, and Chapter 5 is dedicated to ‘Lesser-Known Mid-Century Plays’.

Given the timeline of rebellion against colonial rule in Latin America and Haiti’s early date of independence, it makes sense that Fradinger and Hawkins adopt similar temporal parameters. As R. Andújar and K.P. Nikoloutsos observe (Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage [2020], p. 2):

Hawkins acknowledges the vital importance of Haiti’s successful 1804 rebellion against slavery and colonisation. Nevertheless, Hawkins frames his narrative arc through Haitian history and culture into the twenty-first century as an attempt to move beyond a myopic focus on the revolution to include further periods in Haitian history and culture.

Ultimately, the lenses of Fradinger and Hawkins differ, in that Antígonas explores a single mythic and dramatic tradition across multiple national theatrical cultures, whereas Hacking Classical Forms in Haitian Literature interrogates numerous genres and disparate classical intertexts within a single national tradition. Those who desire Greek and Latin philological insights might gravitate towards Hawkins’s book, though both volumes have much to contribute to literary and dramatic histories, along with their historical and political contexts. Fradinger is especially strong on performance history; and the inclusion of photographs, many of them printed in colour, helps readers bring these productions to the mind’s eye.

The Shelley Circle and the British Romantics provide an additional avenue to draw these books together. Both books situate themselves through discussion of the Shelleys and the Romantics. Fradinger invokes (p. 56; cf. Hawkins p. 2) Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to his 1822 poem Hellas: ‘We are all Greeks … but for Greece … we might still have been savages’. As Hawkins notes, it was ‘a sign of the times that [Jean-Paul] Boyer and Shelley were both looking to the Greek War of Independence’. Hawkins elucidates the gulf between Boyer’s expansive emancipatory vision and Shelley’s ‘progressive’ Eurocentrism. Drawing on the same period, Fradinger observes (p. 57) that, from this point, Antigone’s role as sister comes to be replaced in Latin America by ‘tragic motherhood … linked to national politics’. Fradinger pushes back against several twentieth-century readings of Varela to argue that the playwright ‘offer[s] a critique of colonial and neocolonial violence’. Hawkins draws in the Latin literary tradition by noting (pp. 39–40) that Shelley’s Hellas alludes to Virgil’s iconic Eclogue 4. Hawkins distinguishes between Boyer’s and Shelley’s progressivisms, in that (p. 42):

Taken together, Fradinger and Hawkins each draw upon Shelley’s flawed progressivism in ways that point towards Audre Lorde and contemporary concepts of intersectionality.

Another important intersection between Fradinger and Hawkins is their pointed attention to Morisseau-Leroy’s Antigòn an Kreyòl / Antigòn en Creole (1953; the authors use different spellings). Fradinger gives excellent attention to the linguistic importance of Morisseau-Leroy and his intended audience, noting that, while French was the official language of Haiti, ‘only 10 percent of Haitians – an urban mulatto elite – could speak it’ (p. 117). Hawkins continues to develop Morisseau-Leroy’s work with his later Wa Kreyon (1978), a more overtly political work staged in exile in West Africa against the backdrop of the Duvalier regime. Hawkins notes (p. 166) that Morisseau-Leroy ‘described [Wa Kreyon] as his most important play’, and that ‘the importance of Wa Kreyon derives from the fact that it is his intentional and focused critique of authoritarian power as wielded by the Duvalier regimes’ (p. 166). In ways that I find go back to his early invocation of Audre Lorde, Hawkins discusses (p. 167) the tensions involved in Morisseau-Leroy’s return to Greek myth as opposed to ‘something purely Haitian’.

Perhaps this is simply a question of personal interest, but I have for some time been drawn (without prejudice) to E. Hall’s sentiment that (while not 100% absolute) the reception of Greek tragedy has been largely progressive in its politics in novel applications and volume since 1968–1969 or so (E. Hall, in: Dionysus Since 69 [2004], pp. 1–2). I would welcome dedicated attention to this date as a turning point in these receptions, especially as Hawkins differentiates the early nineteenth-century reception of the Classics between Boyer and Shelley. Is the history of classical reception’s politics genre specific? Along these lines and at the cusp of Hall’s 1969 hallmark date, Fradinger offers (pp. 241–2) attention to José Fuentes Mares’s La joven Antígona se va a la guerra (Young Antigone Goes to War). The play, staged in Mexico during turbulent times and barely one week after a massacre in Mexico City’s Plaza de las Tres Culturas (2 October 1968), features an Antigone who abandons her revolutionary charge of violence to privilege her maternal instincts. Given the 1968 date, Fuentes Mares’s play stands out in a revolutionary period as an Antígona that is at most ambivalent towards calls for uprisings, especially those that would jeopardise the wellbeing of children, however noble the cause. Fuentes Mares’ Antígona is attuned to family in the tradition of her Greek antecedent, though with a politically pacifist decision opposite of Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Antigone figure in Antígona Perez, which premiered only shortly prior. As Fradinger notes, ‘Though ideologically different, both virgin heroines are mothers’ (p. 242). Fradinger observes (p. 241) the Brechtian influence on Fuentes Mares’s play, which fits into a pattern of global receptions that privilege Anouilh and Brecht in tandem with Sophocles (for example, see E.B. Mee and H.P. Foley [edd.], Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage [2011], and J. Weiner, ‘Antigone in Juárez: Tragedy, Politics, and Public Women on Mexico’s Northern Border’, Classical Receptions Journal 7 [2015]).

Following the section on ‘lesser-known plays’, Fradinger’s chapter on Griselda Gambaro’s Antígona Furiosa (1986) is especially important, as is the play itself in the Antigone tradition. As Fradinger observes, set against the violence of Argentina’s Dirty War, Gambaro’s Antigone-figure performs (mostly) within a cage, and she comes back to life at the beginning of the play only to commit suicide at the conclusion. To me, Gambaro powerfully channels fate and variables invoked by F. Söderbäck in the introduction to Feminist Readings of Antigone (2010, p. 3), which insist upon the act of burial, familial bonds and gender to the myth (see also M.F. Nelli, ‘From Ancient Greek Drama to Argentina’s “Dirty War”; Antígona Furiosa: On Bodies and the State’, in: S.E. Wilmer and A. Žukauskaitė [edd.], Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism [2010]).

In its co-authored final chapter Hawkins’s book discusses Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), suggesting that the novel ‘presents a network of anti-epic themes and images that invert material found in the Virgilian epics Georgics and Aeneid’ (p. 227). The chapter’s conclusion (p. 231) joins Augustan antipathy towards Egypt with modern racisms surrounding African bodies. The authors situate Danticat’s work beside ‘a former [now once more current] American president who has openly called Haiti a “shithole” and described immigrants as vectors of disease’. This ‘revolt against silence’, as the chapter is titled, is framed as an antidote counteracting ‘the toxic monumentality of Virgil’s Aeneid and the Palais Sans-Souci itself’.

The prose throughout both volumes is remarkably lucid and accessible. While these monographs will doubtless be of value to professional scholars, they are each sufficiently approachable so that I will not hesitate to assign chapters to undergraduate students. Both books will be valuable additions to university libraries and to the bookshelves of scholars of classical receptions in Latin America.