Home > Catalogue > English Literature > 5 | 2018 > What Isn’t a Cross-Cultural Adaptation, and, if You Know that, then what Isn’t a Cross-Cultural Text?

English Literature | Vol. 5 | December 2018

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Research Article

What Isn’t a Cross-Cultural Adaptation, and, if You Know that, then what Isn’t a Cross-Cultural Text?

Leitch Thomas    University of Delaware    

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abstract

This essay begins by asking why the term ‘cross-cultural adaptation’ should not be extended from adaptations that cross national borders to adaptations that cross temporal, historical, linguistic, medial, and gendered borders. Unlike some theorists who have attempted to define away the problems that arise when the term ‘cross-cultural adaptation’ is extended so broadly that it courts ambiguity, circularity, and redundancy by referring instead to ‘transnational adaptation’, the essay takes those problems as its subject. It suggests that adaptations police and valorize the cultural borders they cross by performing them as borders and the cultures they demarcate as cultures. Since cultures and the borders between them cannot be described without performing them, the essay concludes that the term ‘cross-cultural adaptation’ is as defensible as any other for describing – that is, for performing – the cultural work that adaptations do.

Published
Dec. 17, 2018
Accepted
Dec. 13, 2018
Submitted
Nov. 10, 2018
Language
EN

Keywords: Monoglossia • Adaptation • Performance • Cross-cultural • Heteroglossia

permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/EL/2420-823X/2018/01/001

Copyright: © 2018 Leitch Thomas. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.