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Antigone Claimed: “I Am a Stranger!” Political Theory and the Figure of the Stranger

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro
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Abstract

This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical‐political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty‐first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not‐legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”

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Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Crossing Borders Special Issue , Spring 2013 , pp. 307 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Nicholas Xenos, Angelica Bernal, Ivan Ascher, Roberto Alejandro, Barbara Cruikshank, Emily Heilker, and Ashley Bohrer for their criticism and feedback. This paper developed from my attendance at Bonnie Honig's seminar on Antigone at the 2010 School of Criticism and Theory Program at Cornell University; to all the members of the seminar and especially to Honig I am greatly indebted. Previous versions of this paper were discussed with the members of the political theory reading group at the University of Massachusetts, whose suggestions and critiques, like those of the two anonymous Hypatia reviewers, I deeply appreciate.

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