Indigenous Medea: space, time, and resistance in Wesley Enoch’s Black Medea

Abstract In Wesley Enoch’s 2000 play Black Medea, Seneca’s Medea is reworked for settler-colonial Australia: Enoch’s Medea is an Indigenous woman from an unnamed Land who falls in love with Jason, an Indigenous man from the city with ambitions to succeed by settler-colonial standards. Against the will of her family, Medea reveals to Jason the natural resources lying underneath her Land and allows him to overturn the sacred earth in pursuit of profit for a Western corporation. The tragedy chronicles the subsequent demise of Jason and Medea’s relationship in the settler city and Medea’s filicidal retaliation for Jason’s crimes. Despite the radically different setting of Black Medea from its Roman antecedent, the two plays share numerous thematic concerns as well as several key moments in which the Senecan text is quoted verbatim. This essay contends that in Black Medea, Enoch apprehends topoi of displacement and temporal normativity from Seneca’s Medea and mobilizes them to elucidate the conditions of Indigenous Australians under settler colonialism. By doing so, he offers critical insight towards the use of Indigeneity as an analytic for Medea myths ancient and modern.