Austen, adaptation, and American literature: an analysis of Ibi Zoboi’s Pride

Abstract

Abstract After writing her first novel American Street, Ibi Zoboi turned to romance for refreshment. But the original drafts of Pride disappointed Zoboi, for they were too sociopolitical for her present purpose. Zoboi’s editor suggested that she import the plot of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice into her manuscript as a supportive architecture, and her longed-for romance novel bloomed into being. In the following article, I conclude that Zoboi did not simply strip her novel of its intellectual, social, and political activity when she foregrounded romance and the experience of being a Black teenager in a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood in Pride. Rather, I find that Zoboi relocated that alternative activity underground, to lower strata of her novel. In other words, I identify a significant level of subtextual and specifically literary activity going on in Zoboi’s Austen adaptation. Studying this phenomenon promises insight into the myriad purposes and possibilities associated with adapting Jane Austen (and other highly canonical authors) in the twenty-first century. Zoboi harnesses the power of adaptation, and specifically its built-in intertextuality, to imagine and ensconce African American futures. Then, Pride proves a special illumination of the relationship between adaptation and Afrofuturism. In these pages, I survey this literary layering of Pride, and I argue that Ibi Zoboi’s book, with all its rich ores of intertextuality, ought to be interpreted as a metafictional meditation on the acts of reading and writing. In addition, I indicate how this activity implicates Pride as a seminal Afrofuturist text.