Performing tragic mourning from Antigone to Ashoura : the woman’s wail in comparative perspective.

Abstract

Looking at cultures of performance between classical Greece and the modern-day Arab world, this thesis brings into comparative perspective female mourning and women’s role in grief as represented in theater and ritual. My thesis explores the motif of female mourning and how it has been received and represented in two very different cultural contexts that nevertheless exhibit some important elements of continuity. Female mourning in Arab drama and societies and in Greek tragedy synthesizes and relates to multiples areas of recent scholarly investigation, including studies of grief and mourning, performance of gender and identity, and performance studies. First I analyze the dramatic texts of Antigone by Sophocles and Where Can I Find Someone Like You Ali? by Raeda Taha, in separate chapters, with emphasis on the gender roles and the performance of gender in mourning on the part of the heroines, Antigone and Raeda, in addition to a dissection of how their identity as women and as kin to “martyrs” is produced and perceived in the mourning process. Next, I bring a more focused and specific attention to culturally situated practices of female mourning role in the contemporary Middle East, examining Shi’a mourning rituals in Lebanon and to what extent the associated roles have evolved, suffered the imposition of patriarchal (mis)interpretation, and been amended by the women themselves. This thesis examines two main aspects of female mourning; first, how mourning and violence inspires unity and a pursuit for justice using Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers Of Mourning And Violence as theoretical framework for this notion, and second, this study will be inspecting the performative aspect of female mourning between theater and society, and how performance studies (including the work of Robert Schechner and Peggy Phelan) can illuminate these phenomena. I attempt to utilize the analytical equipment offered by these approaches to further elaborate specific textual practices and cul