Race, Nation and Cultural Power in Film Adaptation

Abstract

The first full-length study of postcolonial, settler-colonial and Indigenous film adaptation, encompassing literary and cinematic texts from Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, Indian, British, and US cultures, this book rethinks adaptation in the context of race and nation. It interrogates adaptation studies’ rejection of ‘fidelity criticism’ to consider the ethics and aesthetics of translating narratives from literature to cinema and across national borders for circulation in the global cultural marketplace. It traces the circulation of cultural power through these adaptations as they move into new contexts and find new audiences, often at a considerable geographical remove from the production of the source material. Further, this book assesses the impact of national and transnational industrial contexts of cultural production on the film adaptations themselves. Individual chapters focus on feminist inflections, where the adaptation foregrounds a postcolonial or settler-colonial positioning at the same time as it produces a feminist critique of canonical fiction; salvaging slavery subtexts, where the adaptation enhances the canonical literary text’s subtle invocations of slavery; relocating racism, where the national setting changes from source text to film, enabling an interrogation of race relations and cultural hierarchies; magic realism, where the literary text’s blurring of realism and fantasy presents opportunities and challenges for visual representation; cultural appropriation, where Indigenous peoples’ culture is represented by settler-colonial culture; ‘told-to’ adaptations, where non-Indigenous filmmakers adapt Indigenous texts; and Indigenous self-representation and self-determination, where Indigenous peoples represent their own cultures, producing the original text and its adaptation.