Borderline communities: aesthetic and authorial thresholds in the postcolonial script and film adaptations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

The borders of adaptation studies are constantly in flux, with scholars keen to discover new perspectives and methodologies, examine new forms and push boundaries across disciplines. Despite these calls, however, there have been few inquiries which have actively analysed the liminal script, caught b...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Rebecca Anastasi
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Université de Bourgogne 2022-06-01
Series:Interfaces
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/interfaces/4589
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Summary:The borders of adaptation studies are constantly in flux, with scholars keen to discover new perspectives and methodologies, examine new forms and push boundaries across disciplines. Despite these calls, however, there have been few inquiries which have actively analysed the liminal script, caught between and betwixt the literary work and the film. To this end, this article takes a contrapuntal approach – tearing down the boundaries between the disciplines of postcolonial, adaptation and screenwriting studies – to analyse the representation of the diaspora, the “borderline community of migration” (Bhabha 1994, 9), in the script and film adaptations of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2006). To do so, various unpublished versions of Soona Taraporevala’s screenplay, as well as Mira Nair’s transposition, are examined with reference to postcolonial tenets, to reveal a dual discourse, reflective of collective authorship, in which conscious and unconscious meaning is negotiated, and deferred from one successive text to the next.
ISSN:2647-6754