The Question of the Foreigner in Homer and Athenian Tragedy, with Carol Dougherty
Abstract
The question of the foreigner is one that permeates ancient Greek literature just as it plagues us today – in terms of global politics and economics (what shall we do about immigration?) and also as questions of identity (who are we and do we still belong here?). Shivaike Shah speaks with Carol Dougherty, Professor of Classical Studies at Wellesley College, about foreignness in classical texts. Works like Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Suppliants reveal ancient Greek cultures that were just as complicated, self-questioning and unsure about themselves as we are today. Both texts are the product of momentous overseas encounters and precipitous cultural change, whether that be the archaic colonization movement in the 8th-6th centuries BCE or the development of the Athenian naval empire in the 5th century BCE. And yet these texts also provide their audiences – and us – with a mechanism for engaging with difference, for making ourselves at home once again in a new world.
Bibliography
Opensource
Aeschylus, The Suppliants, trans. E. D. A. Morshead
Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler
Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)
Paywalled
Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Michael Naas & Pascale-Anne Brault (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992)
Carol Dougherty, The Raft of Odysseus: The Ethnographic Imagination of Homer’s Odyssey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Carol Dougherty, Travel and Home in Homer and Contemporary Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)
Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
Ian Morris, ‘The Use and Abuse of Homer’, Classical Antiquity 5 (1986), 81-129
Anthony Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980)
Transcript
You can find a full transcript of the episode here.