Next Generation Adaptation

Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process explores the ways in which cross-cultural adaptations often stage a collusion between competing cultural capital. The collusion conceals and reveals commonalities and differences between these cultural traditions before giving way to the differences that can distinguish one textual expression from another, just as it ultimately distinguishes one set of readers from another. An adaptation of any sort, but especially those that cross accepted stereotypes, or geographic or political boundaries, provide spectators space to negotiate attitudes and ideas that might otherwise lay latent in the text. Spectators are left to parse through each, often with special attention to the differences that exist between two expressions. Each new set of readers, each generation, distinguishes itself from an earlier set of readers, even as they exist along the same family tree. Given enough time, some new shared organizing strategy emerges until a new encounter or new expression of a text restarts the adaptational process every adaptation can trigger. Taken together, the chapters in Next Generation Adaptation each argue that the texts they consider foreground the kinds of space that exists between texts, between political commitments, between ethical obligations that every filmic text can open when the text is experienced as an adaptation. The chapters esteem the expansive dialogue adaptations accelerate when they realize their capacity to bring together two or more texts, two or more peoples, two or more ideologies without allowing one expression to erase another.