Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His research broadly seeks to rethink the relationship between politics and aesthetics in relation to gender-differentiated colonial logics of capitalist accumulation. His recent book, Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press 2021), seeks to illustrate the relevance of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, to the contemporary critical race philosophy/theory. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Castro discusses his process of decolonial rumination, in which he reflects back and forth on the original Greek text and contemporary adaptations/rewritings of the tragedy in the Americas, as well as the insights these readings provide.
What is your work about?
My book is about making Sophocles’ Antigone relevant to the concerns of contemporary critical race philosophy/theory, broadly understood, inclusive of decolonial theory, settler colonial critique, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique, among others. I was drawn to the tragedy because of the central role that it plays in my discipline, as a canonical text of political theory/philosophy. Like many feminist theorists, I focus on the reasons behind Antigone’s decision to bury her brother in defiance of Creon’s inaugural decision, as Thebes’ new sovereign, to instrumentalise the corpse of Polyneices to establish the limits (or, arguably, the lack thereof) of his own sovereign right over life and death. Unlike many feminist theorists (except for Tina Chanter), I focus on Antigone’s reason to bury Polyneices because he was not Eteocles’ slave. Had Polyneices been a slave, Antigone would likely not have performed her dissident burial. But I also focus on Antigone’s claim to be a metic (resident foreigner), which I interpret in less rhetorical and more statutory terms to open the text to the figuration of other agencies. More broadly, I focus on the ways in which reading ancient imperialism in relation to modern colonialism modifies our understanding of Antigone’s various claims and their theoretical interpretation. Classical sovereignty changed after the colonization of the Americas and the institutionalization of the trans-Atlantic slave trade inaugurated capitalism as a racially and gender-differentiated world-system. These structural processes changed, too, the critical reception of Antigone in the Americas where Antigone performs rather differently in her various journeys through the global south. Engaging in what I call in the book, decolonial rumination, a form of reading back and forth, that time-travels between the original Greek text and contemporary adaptations/rewritings of the tragedy in the Americas, I wanted to re-read the play from the perspective of those who were/are mis-interpellated by its message (an idea I take from James Martel). In other words, I wanted to read the play from the perspective of metics (resident foreigners) and from the perspective of the enslaved, rather than from the perspective of citizens. And I wanted to perform that reading, in order to make the play theoretically and politically relevant to Black and Indigenous peoples today, that is to say, to those who remain subjected to slavery’s aftermath (an idea I take from Saidiya Hartman), and to other people of color in the global south who, when forced to leave their countries of origin, are not given citizenship but something akin to metoikia in the US and Canada (as refugees, stateless, or undocumented immigrants, primarily).
What directions would you like to take your work in the future?
In the future, I would like to perform this kind of theoretical reinterpretation of ancient Greek myths from the exclusive perspective of women of color feminisms. I might revisit Antigone in that future work, but I’ll be focusing on other proto-feminist characters from the rich ancient Greek archive. Some will be as famous as Antigone, as it is the case with the book chapter on Medea that Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen invited me to contribute to The Routledge Handbook on Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy. Others will not. For instance, I would like to write about the servant’s presumable betrayal of Penelope in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (itself a rewriting of Homer’s Odyssey from the perspective of Penelope), which I think is as misunderstood as Penelope’s strategic use of the loom to ward-off the reinstitution of patriarchy tout court, rather than to protect her fidelity to Odysseus, as it is often understood. Both the actions of the servant and those of Penelope are depoliticized, if for different albeit tragically interconnected reasons. To understand the complicated politics of that connection is crucial for contemporary intersectional feminist theory and practice interested in transnational solidarity.
This broader project will also offer me the opportunity to revisit Gayatri Spivak’s interpretation of Echo, in a critical engagement with psychoanalytic theory that will extend my own engagement with Jacques Lacan’s reading of Antigone to the field of language and the problem of the voice. In that future work, I also expect to engage the myth of Procne and Philomena, significant to the feminist politics of Chilean arpilleras (political weavers) against the US backed dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile, along with its resonances in Mampuján (Colombia) and other places in the global south. Likewise, this work will give me the opportunity to advance my own political reinterpretation of Jocasta, in my view the strongest and most overlooked character from Oedipus Tyrannos.
Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?
For a play that accumulates 2,500 years of interpretation—literary, philosophical, and political—my two most exciting insights were: first, to seriously consider what if Antigone were a metic; and second, to consider what if one were to retell the story of Oedipus from the perspective of the enslaved. Most interpretations of Antigone either explicitly or implicitly assume the position of the citizen or universalize it, as if slavery or metoikia could have no impact on the universal humanism attributed to the politics of Antigone’s burial. I show otherwise and thus have something rather significantly new to add to the otherwise vast existing literature on this play. Once you focus on the imperial history of ancient Athens and connect that history to European colonialism’s way of influencing the reception of the classics, you start to think about militant burials differently. You even start to consider, as I do in the last chapter of the book, that mourning and melancholia are insufficient categories for critical theory to understand the ways in which Black, Indigenous and other people of color confront losses that have no place in the symbolic order of their colonially remade polis.
How have readers responded? (Or how do you hope they will respond?)
As a non-classicist, the response from scholars in classics has been more positive than I could have ever anticipated. Tristan Bradshaw and Ben Brown, co-founders of the Critical Antiquities Network, invited me to discuss the book in their workshop and my interpretation was received with the greatest interest and the most generous comments. Notwithstanding my agreement with Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s claim that it is important to stop metaphorizing decolonization, I felt like folks in classics were ready to decolonize antiquity. My book was, thus, a more than welcomed contribution to what I feel the Network wants to do in this field of study. The interview can be seen here.
The response from comparative literature has been equally positive. Moira Fradinger, the literary expert on the reception/adaptation of Antigone in Latin America delivered the nicest review that I have ever received about my work, when discussing the book at the Antigone’s Worldlings Colloquium, an event that I co-organized with Ranji Khanna when in residency at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke. That interview will be available soon but information on that event can already be found here. Finally, the book has also been well received in my own discipline: political theory. Jane Gordon invited me to discuss the book at the Connecticut-UMass Amherst Political Theory Group, a group that is admittedly already on board with decolonial theory, and excited about anti/alter-canonical readings of foundational texts like that of Antigone. The atmosphere of camaraderie was heartwarming, and the intellectual conversation about the limits of the trans-historical connection I make stimulating, as questions of race and colonial structures have changed considerably throughout history. I do not know if Antigone in the Americas will have a broader readership, as it remains a book focused on the interpretation of rather demanding theoretical frameworks (democratic theory, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, the theory of biopolitics and necropolitics, and deconstruction) but I hope that if anything, the book at least motivates more experimental readings of ancient tragedies by critical race theorists.
How has your work influenced your teaching?
I would put it differently, as it is often my teaching that ends up influencing my work. The classroom is a kind of philosophical laboratory of sorts, one in which you can experiment with alternative theoretical interpretations of the text in question, until you finally find the one that allows you to make a more meaningful political/theoretical intervention in your field. I tried this with Antigone but also with other texts. Thus, after several years of teaching Modern Political Theory while trying to retell Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Mandrake from a feminist perspective, I ended up publishing “Queering Lucrezia’s Virtú.” While working on that piece, I started to ask my students, for their final paper, to write an additional scene in which they’ll be retelling the play from Lucrezia’s perspective, rather than from the dominant ones of Callimaco and Ligurio, while trying to do so in Machiavelli’s political style. This is not far from what I try to do in Antigone in the Americas, when I think about Black and Indigenous Antigones in the modern Americas and about a metic Antigone and an enslaved Polyneices in ancient Greece.And I have, since, done similar experiments with Plato’s Republic and Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, when teaching Ancient Political Theory, and with other texts, films and plays I teach in my Decolonial Theory seminar, among other courses I teach.
What else would you like to do with your research, if you could do anything?
I would like to see either a new theatrical or film rendition of Oedipus Tyrannos that retells the story from the perspective of the enslaved, as I do in the book. In that retelling, the story that we are all familiar with, the story of Oedipus’s parricide and incest, moves to the background of the narrative. In the foreground, by contrast, what we would finally see is the political deliberation of the enslaved, insurgently plotting for the liberation of their respective cities. At the center of those discussions will be their effort at instrumentalizing the prophecy that turns Oedipus into a revolutionary weapon in their hands, for the enslaved to get rid of their respective enslavers first in Thebes and then in Corinth.
What’s next for you?
This academic year I’ll be enjoying my sabbatical, while finishing my second book, titled: The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae, scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2022 by Rowman & Littlefield. Written as my way of answering my students what is it that I do, as a critical theorist who writes books, The Militant Intellect offers a way of rethinking the relationship between critical theory and politics. In that book I argue that critical theory cultivates the militancy of the general intellect by training that intellect to work towards the intersectional and structural death of the colonist and thus to envision at the same time the materialization of that feminist decolonial communist queer marronage world that constitutes its emancipatory horizon. In the book I borrow and expand on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idea of conceptual persona to qualify the intellectual labor of critical theory as an undisciplined field, that performs its labor through the creation of conceptual personae capable of subjectivizing critical thought. Doing so, The Militant Intellect argues for the indispensable reinterpretation of Plato’s Philosopher Sovereign, Karl Marx’s Communist, Frantz Fanon’s Rebel, Jacques Derrida’s Specter, Gayatri Spivak’s Subaltern, Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Life, Jacques Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster, Judith Butler’s Antigone/Ismene, and Jordy Rosenberg’s Fox as compelling personifications of intellectual militancy for the general intellect to have new scripts capable of cultivating the virtuosity of its more revolutionary performances.
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
Andrés Fabián Henao Castro is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is the author of The Militant Intellect: Critical Theory’s Conceptual Personae (in production with Rowman & Littlefield) and of Antigone in the Americas: Democracy, Sexuality and Death in the Settler Colonial Present (SUNY Press 2021). His research has also been published in differences, Critical Philosophy of Race, Settler Colonial Studies, Theoria, Theory & Event, Representation, Theatre Survey, Contemporary Political Theory, and Hypatia, among others.
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
