Classicists have turned to reception studies to understand the unique encounters that various historical audiences have had with Greek and Roman literature. This essay explores the cultural mobility of the classics through a Malawian reception of Sophocles’s Antigone.

At the same time that Greek literary studies have broken down boundaries of canon and genre, opening up for analysis previously ignored families of texts, the rise of reception studies has raised new questions about how our present cultural and historical position shapes our interpretations of them. These developments are explored through the case study of Greek tragedy, the most canonical of genres.