Remapping Adaptation: Race, Nation and Fidelity

Abstract

This book is interested in the stories that film adaptations tell about race and nation across the global cultural marketplace, about their contexts of production, and the position of their makers. It does not posit a singular model of postcolonial, settler-colonial, or Indigenous film adaptation. It draws on nineteenth-century narratives that address racial and cultural difference and those that hardly articulate those differences, with those subtexts amplified in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century film adaptations. It examines later texts that grapple with race and nation and their adaptations as well as texts that do not, only to be transplanted to tell the story of another place. It investigates literary texts by settler authors attempting to represent Indigenous people and their film adaptations by settler filmmakers. It attends to literary texts by Indigenous writers and their film adaptations by settler filmmakers. And it focuses on Indigenous-authored narratives and their film adaptations by Indigenous filmmakers. Whether or not a film is ‘faithful’ to its source text is far more complicated than the field acknowledges. A film’s ‘fidelity’ to or challenging of its literary source cannot be divorced from the authorship of each and concomitant questions of cultural property and cultural power.