In “Speaking the Animal’s Voice: Language in Transnational and Transmedia Adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” Kristen Figgins focuses on how Dracula has been adapted in many countries to be the epitome of a threat whose presence is often first alerted by Dracula’s attempt to disguise himself in his mastery of language. Figgins shows how Dracula’s voice is highlighted across various transnational adaptations, with a particular emphasis on stage, comic book, and film adaptations. The central problem with Dracula’s desire to master language is not necessarily, as some scholars have theorized, his desire to assimilate and then conquer another country, but rather his fundamental association with animals. An essential hinge point across all of these media is that being an animal is Dracula’s most salient characteristic. In this way, Dracula is multilingual in a disturbing way: his mastery of language is a cross-species transgression that has important implications as his multilingualism is adapted into other languages and silent mediums.
In “Adapting the Adaptation: The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Brazilian Pop Culture,” Alexandra Rodriguez offers analysis of another shift in language and point of view on a familiar narrative. Published in 1977, Tieta do Agreste by Jorge Amado is an adaptation of the biblical parable of the Prodigal Son. By rewriting the parable in colloquial, oral, and humorous Portuguese, the narrator strips the original text from its religious formality and provides a follow-up to the story of the repentant child that returns home. In the Brazilian version of the parable, the gender of the protagonists is inverted and the prodigal daughter, similar to her masculine counterpart, reenters the community, after engaging in a licentious life. Rodriguez shows how in accentuating the colloquial language that resembles popular genres like the Melodramatic Serial, the author dignifies the struggles for survival of women of color in the Brazilian northeast. Rodriguez suggests that because of this language shift, Amado's prodigal daughter has continued to be a source of inspiration for new adaptations from a wide range of perspectives.
Rebecca Kumar further explores the change in perspective brought to bear on familiar narratives when categories of identity are in tension. In “Adaptations of Blackness and the Limits of (Caste) Analogy in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara,” Kumar explores the implications of theorizing race in Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara (2006), an Indian-particularly Hindu-adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello. It revises racial difference in the play as caste difference in the film, inviting a comparison between the two systems of disadvantage. This paper uses Omkara to evaluate whether or not race is analogous to caste, highlighting where racism and casteism align and don’t align in the film. Ultimately, Kumar argues that caste is not an adequate lens through which anti-Blackness becomes legible, but, rather, constitutive of what might be called the emerging racial category, Brownness, which has been much less theorized in both critical race and film studies.
Finally, in “Spoken and Subtitled: How Adaptations Inflect Dialogue,” Thomas Leitch explores the cultural politics of Hollywood movies that seek to make foreign nationals’ dialogue both intelligible and realistic by presenting it in accented English, a strategy that disguises acts of appropriation by presenting them as invocations of universality. This presentation examines spoken dialogue in films from In the Heat of the Night to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and subtitled dialogue in films from The Harder They Fall to Airplane. It explores the relationship between accents that are marked as such, exaggerated and emphasized, and accents that are accepted as neutral or normative in Hollywood films. It argues that the use of myriad dialects, which carries the potential to challenge the norms of spoken English, typically reinforces those norms instead by presenting some accents as outliers to what passes in these films’ dualistic economy for normal or unaccented patterns of speech. Its most telling implications are for the study of adaptation, a parallel process that inevitably seeks both to normalize what it presents as universal stories and to exoticize the particulars of the cultures that speak through them.
All of these papers raise new questions about the implications for understanding adaptations with different voices, accents, and multimodal, multilingual, or multicultural elements. Papers will be shorter than fifteen-minutes long, leaving sufficient time for lively discussion.