ABSTRACT

Since the beginning of cinema as a new art form, literature and film have inspired, antagonized, rivaled, and remediated one another. 1 The debate on literature and film is, in fact, as old as film itself. How does postcoloniality reframe and reinterpret this long-standing debate between literature and film? After a brief survey of the complex field of adaptation studies, I turn to an analysis and comparison of two postcolonial adaptations made by diasporic female filmmakers: Bride and Prejudice directed by Gurinder Chadha, based on Jane Austen’s classic Pride and Prejudice, and Women Without Men directed by Shirin Neshat, based on the novel of the same title by Shahrnush Parsipur. Using these two examples of postcolonial adaptation, I will suggest that the intersection of cinematic adaptation and postcolonial cinema offers a particularly dense nexus from which to explore issues of postcolonial critique and its complex links to the cultural industry. This marriage of adaptation and postcolonial critique is, in fact, not always successful. In the transposition of semiotic codes, languages, genres, audiences, and markets something is as often lost as gained in translation.