Antigone “outsider” in Creon’s democracy: analysis of a contemporary reinterpretation of the Sophoclean myth1

My paper analyzes four contemporary rewritings of Sophocles’s Antigone: the novel Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie, the Canadian film Antigone (2019) by Sophie Deraspe, and two British dramas: Aaliyah (After Antigone) (2021) by Kamal Kaan and Antigone (2022) by Inua Ellams. These works present an original vision of Antigone as an Islamic girl (Pakistani, Algerian or Bangladeshi) whose family has emigrated to a Western democracy (Britain or Canada). In this reinterpretation as a foreigner, Antigone takes on traits traditionally typical of Medea. Although Antigone is well socially integrated, the situation of one or both of her brothers (terrorism, delinquency or political opposition) leads her to reveal the condition of racism, intolerance and marginalization faced by minorities in a theoretically democratic, libertarian and inclusive country. At the same time, the characterization of Creon also undergoes a profound change, compared in particular to the Brechtian interpretation: he (or she, in Kamal Kaan’s drama) is not a violent dictator, or a politician who came to power in an exceptional situation, but a legitimate leading exponent of a democratic Western government, who (except in Deraspe’s film) shares the same foreign origins as Antigone’s family, but precisely for this reason must be even tougher in order not to lose the consensus acquired among the nation he governs, a consensus obtained also by denying part of his/her own native culture and satisfying the people’s need for order and security. This new interpretation thus allows the myth of Antigone to be used as a very current tool for social denunciation, not only of the failed integration of minorities in the great Western democracies, but of other problematic aspects of contemporary “civilized” countries, such as the populist tendencies of politics or the use of (social)media, through which, for example, the choruses are rendered in some rewritings.