Rereading Medea Across Borders-Cultural Encounters and Postcolonial Rewrites in Liz Lochhead’s Medea, Yüksel Pazarkaya’s Mediha and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea

Abstract

Euripides’ Medea is often studied as a revolutionary play for its representation of a controversial female character. Drawing on Medea and the myth of “Jason and the Argonauts”, Euripides’ story is not simply about a woman so blinded by extreme feelings of passion and revenge that she would victimize her own children. Euripides also invites the readers and audiences to think about Medea’s complex motivation within the context of an outsider, surrounded by powerful feelings of isolation and exclusion. Medea lends itself to adaptations as its plot makes a perpetual call for potential postcolonial and feminist rewriters. This chapter explores three contemporary cross-cultural adaptations of Medea’s story: Liz Lochhead’s Medea, Yüksel Pazarkaya’s Mediha and Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea. Each of these authors raises questions about geographical and spiritual borders by adapting Euripides’ Medea to their Scottish-English, Chicanx or Turkish-German contexts. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Ana Filipa Prata and Rodrigo Verano; individual chapters, the contributors.