Revising race and social mobility in adapting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

Abstract

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is an American novel that has arguably established a global cultural recognizability, with the Hollywood adaptations of this novel commanding the biggest budgets and stars. However, Fitzgerald’s depiction of race poses problems for the contemporary reader, as it both critiques and replicates racism. Baz Luhrmann’s Hollywood-produced The Great Gatsby (2013) and the independent production G (2002), directed by Christopher Scott Cherot, both choose to emphasize this theme. Whilst Luhrmann links race to aspirational hip-hop “bling” consumerism, G recreates the theme as intrinsic to the meaning of Gatsby as a parable of the failure of social mobility. In 2021, The Great Gatsby was released from global copyright restrictions. The article ends by asking how we read these texts through an African and indeed South African perspective, and the possibilities a South African adaptation of Gatsby might offer.