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Kushner at Colonus: Tragedy, Politics, and Citizenship

The epilogue of Tony Kushner's Angels in America is often criticized as modeling a political capitulation, allowing vague spiritual promise to eclipse real political difference. This article reads Kushner's epilogue in dialogue with Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus as a negotiation with the tragic condition that intertwines the political and the spiritual, set in a ritual space of utopian transformation. The plays' tragic subjects, persisting past their expected demise and defined by their continued exclusion from the polis, demand citizenship as an act of reincorporation and an amelioration of suffering, offering transformative benefits to the state in turn. For Kushner, following Sophocles, the demand for citizenship is a demand for personal and political subjecthood, a precondition to all other politics and always a spiritual transfiguration.