Antigone Power: una straniera alle frontiere dell’Europa

Abstract

In many respects, classics may be considered as a language, that was aptly used to legitimate the imperialist exploitation of white people over the so called “Third World countries”. My paper is aimed at understanding whether and to which extent the Greco-Roman Antiquity as such can become a tool for telling a submerged history and for bringing forth its non hegemonic subjects. I will take into consideration a collective experience conducted by a theatre company in the south of Italy during the summer of 2018. Through a workshop involving immigrant people in the city of Palermo, Ali Farah, a Somali-Italian writer, staged an experimental rewriting of Sophocles’ Antigone, which starts from the telling of personal stories of migration through the Mediterranean sea. Grounding my analysis in the comparison between Antigone’s defiance of the power and the crossing of borders, I will underline the revolutionary message that the rewriting of this myth in contemporary Fortress Europe delivers.