Dominican Prometheus: Tragedy, Race, and Héctor Incháustegui Cabral (1912-1979)

Public lecture by Dan-El Padilla Peralta (Princeton)

As part of our celebration of 125 years of Classics at the University of Birmingham, the Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology invites you to a public lecture by Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Associate Professor at Princeton University.

Professor Padilla’s research focuses both on Roman history (of the Republic and Early Empire) and on classical reception in contemporary American and Latin American cultures, on which he will be talking in the public lecture at University of Birmingham.

This lecture will examine the Prometeo of the Dominican poet, playwright, and novelist Héctor Incháustegui Cabral (1912-1979). Published together with adaptations of Sophocles’s Philotectes and Euripides’s Hippolytus in 1964, Cabral’s take on Aeschylus is an underappreciated turning-point in Dominican and Caribbean experiments with Greek tragedy — and a promising point of departure for critical reflection on the entanglements of race, politics, and classical reception. Of particular interest and suggestive force is the play’s refraction of hellenophile and anglophile tendencies in Dominican literary production, and the racializing agendas and properties of that production more generally. 

You can learn more about Professor Padilla’s critical approach to the study of ‘Classics’ and the importance of redefining the discipline in this short video: Forward Thinker Dan-el Padilla Peralta on redefining the classics to be more inclusive - YouTube

This is an in person event, but should you be unable to attend in person, you can attend via the online link. Please register using the link on this page for access to the online portal for the lecture.