Scholarly attention to cinematic adaptation remains a neglected site of inquiry in contemporary cinema, literary, and cultural studies. The lack of attention may be due in part to the theoretical limitations of scholarship on adaptation and the moralistic systems of evaluation it relies upon, usually aimed at assessing a text’s faithfulness to source material. This dissertation intervenes in traditional understandings of cinematic adaptation by proposing that adaptation is a site of social transformation, and an important technology in the mapping of historical and social time. In this dissertation, I address the distinctive racial logics instigated by the events of September 11, 2001, and the role of the adaptive process in shaping their circulation in American culture. I argue that adaptation and post-9/11 racial logics share similar meaning-making processes. They both transplant ‘old’ narratives into new settings, signifying a new location in time and space through repetition and reiteration. This alignment allows racial logics to appropriate the adaptive process, and introduce particular racial narratives and ideologies into the textual meaning-making process. Not only do these narratives articulate regimes of space, time, gender, and race that reflect the effects of racialization after 9/11, but they also help to create models of citizenship complicit with a post-9/11 racial order.
Focusing on women writers and filmmakers from the South Asian and Iranian diasporas, I examine how post-9/11 racial logics align with cinematic adaptation through three sites of citizenship formation: the transformation of women’s political performance and self-making in the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s novel Persepolis; the creation of female cosmopolitan subjects in Gurinder Chadha’s retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in her film Bride and Prejudice; and the distinct engagement between gender and the nation in the representations of South Asian American citizenship in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake and its adaptation by filmmaker Mira Nair. The influence of post-9/11 racial logics on the adaptive process, in each of these texts, results in images of female citizenship that adhere to a post-9/11 racial order, prefacing modernness, cosmopolitanism, and a Westernized, liberal feminist point of view. While cinematic adaptation works as a technology of racialization, the female-female authorial pairings that I examine in this dissertation do on occasion subvert the patriarchal regimes that keep post-9/11 racial logics in place. As a result, Chadha, Satrapi, and Nair also use the adaptive process to speak back to the masculinist narratives of loss, heroics, and hostilities popularized in the wake of 9/11.