ABSTRACT
This chapter fleshes out the temporal, affective, and ethical implications of a borderland adaptation process. It takes as case studies Rudolfo Anaya’s 1972 novel, Bless Me, Última, and Carl Franklin’s 2013 adaptation of it as an example, alongside Ted Chiang’s 1998 “Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 adaptation of it into the film Arrival. In the twenty-first century, the concept of borderlands is a critical spatio-political space that affects the real and the imaginary. Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of the borderlands has expanded with resonance not limited to the borders of the United States and Mexico. Rather than imagine borders as impermeable boundaries, she invites us to understand borderlands spaces as producing dynamic cultural mixtures that have the power to disrupt colonial logics for those who inhabit them. Although these are two very different texts and adaptations, they both illustrate the idea of borderlands adaptation because of the way that both protagonists, Última and Louise, become adaptors who use omission, prolepsis, and analepsis to understand the complex and ongoing relationships between the pasts of colonial anti-Indigenous violence and the possible presents that become possible only through attention to that history.
