Hellenic Common: Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era

Phillip Zapkin, Hellenic Common: Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). 9781003082743.

Reviewed by Clare Kearns, Brown University, clare_kearns@brown.edu.

African Medea; Antigone in Ferguson; Ajax in Iraq: adaptations of Greek tragedies have gone worldwide. At the same time, our world is increasingly determined by neoliberalism, a political philosophy which prioritizes privatization, the individual, and commercial profit to the detriment of public services, the collective, and economic equality. 

Phillip Zapkin’s new book, Hellenic Common: Greek Drama and Cultural Cosmopolitanism in the Neoliberal Era,is therefore a timely and much-needed addition to both Classical scholarship and cultural criticism. Zapkin attempts to wrestle with the place of theater, an art form rooted in public and collective experiences, in an increasingly privatized and profit-driven world. In the broadest analysis, Hellenic Common draws on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Commonwealth¹ to argue that the literature of Classical Greece belongs to a “cultural commonwealth”—which Zapkin defines as “shared intangibles that make social life comprehensible through commonly recognizable/interpretable symbols” (12)—a commonwealth which resists the neoliberal fixation on ownership and which rejects reductive arguments about a putative “universal” Classics in favor of a more cosmopolitanist approach. But Hellenic Common also offers original readings of understudied texts, revealing how each of the theatrical adaptations studied responds, in its own way, to neoliberalism’s irrevocable distortion of our reality. Helpfully, Zapkin interweaves his analysis with illuminating explanations of the impacts of neoliberalism on geopolitics, the family, and the individual self.

The author begins in Chapter One by outlining how the concept of “adaptation” functions in the study—a helpful and necessary starting point, given the slippery nature of the concept (When is it an adaptation instead of a translation? What distinguishes adapting from referencing?)—defining it, most succinctly, as “a text that devotes substantial attention to directly and purposefully reworking a previous text” (22), precluding, e.g., texts which are perhaps best understood as merely influenced by Greek tragedy. The author then introduces what becomes the most substantive component of the book’s central thesis: that adaptations resist ideas about cultural ownership produced both by the neoliberal fixation on profit and racist ideas of Western cultural hegemony. Here, Zapkin makes the key observation that these two threats—neoliberalism and racism—are by no means neatly separable, and in fact may be considered two sides of the same coin: “Part of the anti-capitalist potential of adaptation is that it problematizes the idea that the West/global north owns Greece as part of its exclusive cultural patrimony” (41). This idea will, happily, go on to guide the analysis of the book’s subsequent chapters.

Indeed, it is the premise from which Chapter Two starts: “In the increasingly financialized world of neoliberal late capitalism, even the relations of colonial domination are commodified” (47). In this chapter, Zapkin reads two modern plays, Femi Osofisan’s Women of Owu (adapting Euripides’ Trojan Women) and Moira Buffini’s Welcome to Thebes (loosely adapting Sophocles’ Antigone, with ample reference to other Greek tragedies), as staging critiques of the neoliberal global north’s economic exploitation of the global south. Osofisan takes up the condemnation of Athenian imperialism implicit in Trojan Women, so Zapkin suggests, and appropriates it in a criticism of the war in Iraq, with which Osofisan’s British audience in 2004 would be intimately familiar. Similarly, Buffini uses the political turmoil and power struggles central to Antigone to depict Liberian politics after its 1999–2003 civil war, with the character Theseus “represent[ing] the interests of the global north in his frequently paternalistic and exploitative plans for the rebuilding of Thebes, rooted in economic (neo) colonialist policies” (62). One wonders if, given Zapkin’s mention of Theseus’ “sharp blue suit and tie” (62), it might not be tendentious to call Theseus Buffini’s stand-in for Tony Blair or George W. Bush. For Zapkin, though, these two plays call neoliberalism into question not only through their content, but also through their form as adaptations which draw from a global cultural commons.

The next two chapters also contain close readings of relatively recent adaptations of Greek tragedies that interrogate, in Zapkin’s reading, the effects of neoliberalism on modern society. Chapter Three takes a welcome twist towards a more gender-sensitive analysis, reading Marina Carr’s The Bog of Cats (adapting Euripides’ Medea) as revealing the intractable impact of neoliberalism on the family, which has become a site for economically productive, transactional relationships and in which women inevitably bear the brunt of (re)productivity. At the end of the chapter, Zapkin reminds us that the increasing privatization of the family can be counteracted by engaging in collective publics such as theater-going. Chapter Four looks at Colin Teevan’s 2004 play Alcmaeon in Corinth (adapting, and filling in the gaps of, Euripides’ fragmentary play by the same title), arguing that Teevan’s play lays bare the neoliberal imperative to always be enjoying, desiring, and consuming, and—inextricably—to view the self “as a marketable commodity” (99), which precludes the possibility of sufficient enjoyment or consumption. The fundamental critique here is the neoliberal commitment to the individual self rather than broader collectives.

Chapter Five takes a different approach as it seeks to concretize one of the book’s larger claims: that adaptation works in service of a “cosmopolitan worldview” by “train[ing] audiences to find the familiar in the strange” (124). Zapkin reads Yael Farber’s Molora, which combines Aeschylus’s Oresteia with Xhosa songs, as staging cosmopolitanism at its finest by combining the legacies of two disparate societies into one new cultural performance. But a cosmopolitan worldview, as Zapkin reminds us, is not only staged by adaptations; rather, it is woven “into the fabric of adaptation” (132). In other words, cosmopolitanism need not entail the melding of two disparate cultures. It is simply the process of sharing in “collective cultural achievements” (144) itself, inherent to adaptation, which begets an anti-neoliberal, cosmopolitan ethics. Implicitly, this chapter responds to the critique of the previous chapter, by pointing to the inherently collective and public work of adaptation. Zapkin’s conclusion ties together the threads of his various arguments while also pointing out one serious limitation to theatrical adaptation’s ability to reflect and produce a cultural commonwealth: going to the theater is expensive, and the scripts Zapkin made use of are largely unavailable to anyone without access to a university library. “Building a global commonwealth,” Zapkin concedes, “requires overcoming serious limitations posed by inequality and limited access to cultural materials” (153).

Hellenic Common is at its strongest when it takes an explicitly activist approach to the question at hand: moving adroitly between literary and cultural criticism, Zapkin models a form of analysis which attends to both words on the page and how readers come to access those words in material form. On page 59, for example, Zapkin takes on the corrupt profit motives behind modern copyright laws, which often preclude equitable sharing in the cultural commonwealth; similarly, on page 70, he acknowledges the possibility that going to the theater may indeed weaken “potentially revolutionary action” through a disavowal of one’s own culpability in systems of exploitation which is enacted simply by attending theatrical productions critiquing those systems. Zapkin strongly cautions against this bourgeois complacency. 

Even so, Zapkin’s claims would be stronger if they were more clearly situated within the arguments of Classicists working in reception studies which are in interpretive alignment with his. I am thinking of Hardwick² and even more urgently of Greenwood,³ who theorizes a cosmopolitan, “omni-local” Classics in place of a “universal” Classics. Greenwood is also interested in the global scope of Classical adaptations and receptions, and she locates liberatory potential (that is, liberation from Eurocentric receptions) in an omni-local Classics just as Zapkin does in his cultural commonwealth. The ideas of Greenwood and Zapkin are by no means identical, but Zapkin’s arguments would be sharpened by a clearer explanation of how they differ from or extend long-established theories of Classical reception.

A further, but very brief, caveat lector: Zapkin’s claim on page 62 that “[Theseus] does not appear in the Oedipus storyline, much less in Sophocles’ Antigone” does not take into account the very prominent role of Theseus in Oedipus at Colonus, the last of Sophocles’ three Theban plays. One might also desire some further discussion surrounding the thorny politics of anti-neoliberal adaptations staged and funded by neoliberal states like Britain and the United States. Zapkin mentions it: “Neoliberal disavowal may involve governments or wealthy patrons supporting anti-neoliberal plays as a means of obscuring their own positions as exploiters within a global economy” (49), though without further treatment. But these issues do not impact the argument of Hellenic Common nor the book’s ability to make for an artistically and politically energizing read.

Hellenic Common represents an exciting addition to the field of reception studies. It will prove insightful, galvanizing reading not only for Classicists but also for anyone in the neoliberal era who locates purpose in art, theater, and most of all, collectivity.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Buying Piraeus, Owning Greece (1–21)
1. Adaptation: Shared Cultural Myths (22–46)
2. Economic (Neo)colonialism: Exploitation Makes Globalization Go ‘Round (47–73)
3. …And Their Families: Neoliberal Family and the Dissolution of the Social (74–98)
4. Korinthiazomai: Rewriting Desire and Perverse Enjoyment (99–123)
5. Ubuntu: Building a Common World (124–47)
Conclusion. Buying Greece: Or, You Get What You Pay for (148–59)

Notes

1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

2. Lorna Hardwick, “Fuzzy Connections: Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English,” in Tradition, Translation, Trauma: The Classic and the Modern, ed. Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011), pp. 39–60.

3. Emily Greenwood, “Afterword: Omni-Local Classical Receptions,” Classical Receptions Journal 5.3 (2013), pp. 354–61.