
In this public lecture, Distinguished Professor Bonnie Honig describes her response to a recent turn to “refusal” (challenging settler colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, or neoliberalism) and looks at The Bacchae as a drama of refusal.
The Bacchants in Euripides’ play refuse work (shunning the “shuttle and loom”), join forces, idle on Cithaeron, fight and then topple a king, and return to Thebes to claim their right to the city, before being exiled. The Bacchae is not normally seen as a drama of refusal but the women commit regicide and when they experiment with pleasure and spirituality outside the city (this is their offence, and their resource) they model a refusal with world-building powers.
Join Professor Honig as she considers the concept of “fabulation” as a “refusal concept,” and uses a reading of black girlhood in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) to confront the question of infrapolitics among black women, with revolutionary political implications.
Convenors: Professor Desmond Manderson and Associate Professor Fiona Jenkins