Intercultural Screen Adaptation: A Global

Conversation
Michael Stewart and Robert Munro, eds. Intercultural Screen
Adaptation: British and Global Case Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
UP, 2020, pp. 265. ISBN: 9781474452038 £80.00 (hardcover)
Intercultural Screen Adaptation: British and Global Case Studies is an exciting new contribution
to the discourse of adaptation studies, bringing together scholars from many different
geographical locations to examine the process and product of adaptation (Hutcheon) at
the junctures of culture, history, and national identity. In doing so, this collection goes
deep into the realm of transnational understanding, exploring some of the key issues
that adaptations—and their analyses—raise with regard to the societies that produce
them, and the imaginaries that they not only conjure but critique.
As Sarah Cardwell noted in The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, adaptation studies ‘is
a massively expanded and proliferating field’ (7), but—it would seem by reviewing the
index of that volume—one which has often neglected to include intercultural adaptation as part
of its norms. The analysis of intercultural adaptation has much for which
to thank Laurence Raw (2012, 2020), whose passing in 2018 is commemorated in
Intercultural Screen Adaptation. Raw, an English scholar based in Turkey, was a strong advocate
for considering texts from multiple cultural perspectives, as a way of broadening
the outlook and relevancy of textual-based study.
Others have also considered the many cultural and contextual factors surrounding
textual transposition, including Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas (2015), Della
Coletta (2012), Katja Krebs (2013), and Eckart Voigts (2009). As long as a decade ago,
Voigts recommended that adaptation theorists turn their attention to the challenge
of merging ‘the study of social constructions of national, regional, local, ethnic, gendered or
class- and age-based identities and research into transcultural images and
stereotypes’ with ‘textual questions of intertextual and intermedial contact’ (150). In
this context, Intercultural Screen Adaptation is a timely recognition of the many different
ways that critical theory can be deployed in the analysis of adaptation, recreating itself
for new audiences.
Framed with the subtitle of ‘British and Global Case Studies’, this collection has
clearly been informed by inter- and cross-cultural, and national and transnational concerns.
However, it must also be noted that for the most part the screen examples continue to draw from
British or European screen cultures. There is the odd Australian or
Canadian example, albeit both Commonwealth nations, and in one instance analysis
of work by South Korean director, Park Chan-wook. For the most part though, the lens
through which the theme of intercultural adaptation is viewed is still British, offering a
mostly Western perspective on a global subject.
Intercultural Screen Adaptation has five parts: nostalgia and heritage; lost or neglected
texts; the constant construction and revision of national imaginaries; portrayals of