Details

Plenary Sessions:

• Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), Keynote Speaker
• Maria Sachiko Cecire (Bard College), Plenary Respondent
• Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (University of Houston), Author Talk
• Round table on violence and adaptation studies (TBA)

Jyotika Virdi (2006) described the feminist creator seeking to represent rape in film as caught between a ‘rock and a hard place’—that is, between the ethical call to represent oppressive reality, and the risk that representing violence may perpetuate harm. Similar concerns underlie the representation of racial violence, homophobia and transphobia, and graphic physical violence, with which adaptations of high-status cultural texts must frequently grapple.

This two-day, online workshop will bring together specialists in the contemporary adaptation and in adaptation as a premodern cultural practice to consider what concerns shape the reception and re-visioning of violence. We will explore the stakes involved in adaptation, and the uses and abuses of violence in adapting classic texts. Our definition of ‘classic’ is broad - we seek to bring together scholars working on adaptations (any period) of ‘high status cultural texts’, where the source texts predate 1865. 

See: https://amybrownresearch.net/adapting-violence-in-from-classic-texts/

Call for Papers