162 Lindiwe Dovey

Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of

Adaptation Studies
Lindiwe Dovey

Introduction: When is Adaptation?

In the guest book outside of John Akomfrah’s installation work, Mnemosyne,1
exhibited from 10 July to 30 August 2010 in the British Film Institute Gallery,
one anonymous visitor wrote, “Nice? Art?” One can only wonder what this
visitor experienced as s/he watched the forty-five minutes of Mnemosyne, a
poetic single screen event with sad, sumptuous moving images overlain with
music and voice-over narration, mostly composed of quotations from well-
known works of literature by John Berger, Matsuo Basho, EE Cummings,
Zbigniew Herbert, Ezra Pound, Milton, Homer, Jan Carew, Shakespeare, Sa-
muel Beckett, Nietzsche, and Sophocles. Was it Akomfrah’s images them-
selves – a snowy landscape, a boat, archival images of black Britons – in this
work exploring memories of migrant labour in the West Midlands of England
that made the visitor question its artistic status? Was it the music – Schubert,
Wagner, Beethoven (which was not referenced, as another visitor pointed out
in the guest book) – that brought about the visitor’s confusion? Or was it the
self-conscious and overwhelming literary quotation from so many historical
and geographical quarters that made the visitor ponder, ironically perhaps,
what art is, and whether Mnemosyne qualified as it?
I pose this scene, and these questions, not only because they are central
to the concerns of this essay – which explores, among other things, the rela-
tionship between art and adaptation, and the often overlooked position of
the audience in understandings of adaptation – but also because they are
central to Adaptation Studies and to why Adaptation Studies matters. And
it would seem important to reconsider why this area of study matters and
how it is being remade at this moment in time when it has, finally, been
accepted as a field in its own right, with pioneers (for example, George
Bluestone, Brian McFarlane, and Deborah Cartmell), major scholarly associ-
ations (for example, the Literature / Film Association, and the Association

1 Mnemosyne, dir. John Akomfrah, 2010. This installation work has now been adapted itself into a
feature film called Nine Muses (2011).

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 Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies 163

of Adaptation Studies), important journals (Literature / Film Quarterly, Adap-

tation, and Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance), and international con-
ferences and interest (for example, Pascal Nicklas’ and Oliver Lindner’s
“Adaptation and Cultural Appropriation” conference at Bayreuth University
in February 2010, where the articles collected here were discussed).
While Adaptation Studies has, as with all other fields of scholarly in-
quiry, its own values and therefore its own blind spots – blind spots to
which I will refer later in this essay – it offers a peculiarly privileged vantage
point when it comes to considering what art is. Via Adaptation Studies we
are able to see not the so-called originality and genius of singularly unique
works of art, but the contingency of art, and the need to explore the ways in
which, and for whom, aesthetic value is created. In this way, Adaptation
Studies has tremendous potential for contributing to understandings of how
notions of high and popular cultural production, or of what counts as art
and what does not, are produced and sustained rather than intrinsic to texts
and objects. For, every work that is self-consciously an adaptation simulta-
neously acknowledges the impossibility of the unique artwork and the ge-
neric process of remaking that defines what we experience as art.
The film scholar Dudley Andrew acknowledges that all filmmaking and,
by extension, all art-making is fundamentally a process of remaking and, in
turn, of historical process, whether this is recognised by filmmakers and
critics or not. He writes:
Whether it be the struggle of the avant-garde against Hollywood, or of an auteur
against a genre, events in the field of film occur as an interplay of novelty and stability.
The complexity of this interplay has a name: history. Not a sequence of events, his-
tory is rather the revaluation by which events are singled out and understood in suc-
cessive eras.2 (my emphasis)
If history is, as Andrew says, the complex interplay of novelty and stability
then adaptation scholars are fundamentally concerned with history and, even
more so, with historiography; after all, cultural products that announce them-
selves as adaptations of earlier cultural products demand a historiographical
perspective. Furthermore, Andrew urges us to see theory itself not as “a gov-
erning discourse outside history and films” but “exactly the process of rewrit-
ing our historical moment through films”.3 How we deal with this responsi-
bility, this awareness that the “institution of theory is always hermeneutic,
always bound to context and to the texts of the past rewritten for the
present”,4 is what is at stake. There is also pedagogical value here, however,
for as Thomas Leitch has emphasised, “By treating every text as a text to be

2 Andrew, Dudley, “Valuation (of Genres and Auteurs)”, in: Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film
Theory, Oxford 1984, 107–132, 127.
3 Andrew, “Valuation”, in: Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory, 131.
4 Ibid.

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164 Lindiwe Dovey

rewritten, [adaptation practitioners] empower students with a sense of them-

selves as rewriters rather than consumers of texts”.5
There continues to be, however, strenuous resistance to the idea that art
is a contextual and historical construct and inevitably involves, in part, the
remaking of something that has come before. In her book of essays, Where
the Stress Falls (2001), cultural critic Susan Sontag rehearses some of the
biases that have long plagued Adaptation Studies. She would appear to sup-
port a project of re-reading and re-seeing Great Works of Art, but voices
derogatory views on the act of remaking. In terms of the importance of re-
reading and re-seeing, she insists that “No book is worth reading once if it
is not worth reading many times”,6 and complains that “one hardly finds
anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies,
which is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast
appetite for seeing and re-seeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious
past)”.7 Sontag casts remaking, however, exclusively in negative terms:
While the point of a great film is now, more than ever, to be a one-of-a-kind achieve-
ment, the commercial cinema has settled for a policy of bloated, derivative filmmak-
ing, a brazen combinatory or re-combinatory art, in the hope of reproducing past
successes. Every film that hopes to reach the largest possible audience is designed as
some kind of remake. Cinema, once heralded as the art of the twentieth century,
seems now, as the century closes numerically, to be a decadent art.8
A remake, in Sontag’s perspective, then, is something essentially commercial
and decadent, and that therefore constitutes the opposite of art. The process
of remaking, she suggests, is a kind of heresy against the institution of art and
is to be situated in the realm of the popular, the banal. If she can acknowl-
edge, however, that “no book is worth reading once if it is not worth reading
many times”, why can she not also accept that no work of art is worth making
if it is not worth making many times? For remaking always, inevitably, in-
volves a process of re-reading and / or re-seeing other works. Adaptation
scholar Linda Hutcheon perhaps had Sontag’s condemnation – among others
– in mind when she wrote, “I have been struck by the unproductive nature of
[…] that negative evaluation of popular cultural adaptations as derivative and
secondary”.9
The distinction that Sontag implies but does not fully articulate in “A
Century of Cinema” is the longstanding tension between auteurist (auth-

5 Leitch quoted in Raw, Laurence, “Towards a pedagogy for teaching adaptations”, in: Journal of
Adaptation in Film & Performance 2.3 (2009): 223–237, 223.
6 Sontag, Susan, “Pedro Páramo”, in: Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, London 2001, 106–
108, 108.
7 Sontag, Susan, “A Century of Cinema”, in: Susan Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, London 2001,
117–122, 122.
8 Sontag, “A Century of Cinema”, in: Sontag, Where the Stress Falls, 117.
9 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, London, New York 2006, 31.

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 Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies 165

ored) filmmaking and genre filmmaking, and – more generally – between an

author-centred and an audience-centred approach to understanding what
art is. Given their acknowledgement of precedent, adaptations have a similar
effect to genre films which, according to one scholar, “offend our most
common definition of artistic excellence: the uniqueness of the art object,
whose value can in part be defined by its desire to be uncaused and unfami-
liar, as much as possible unindebted to any tradition, popular or other-
wise”.10 As Rainer Emig has, similarly, noted, “Adaptation problematises
the notion of authorship in a productive way”.11 He asks questions that are
important if we are to understand more fully how adaptations are produced
and apprehended, such as “How consciously does intertextuality work?”
and “Does the user recognise what is being shown as an adaptation?”12 In
fact, the relevance of Adaptation Studies partially relies on a positive answer
to the latter question, for if the general user does not recognise what is being
shown as an adaptation then, for all intents and purposes, Adaptation Stud-
ies does not challenge rarefied scholarly practice but contributes to it fully,
with scholars laboriously working out, in retrospect, the relationships be-
tween sources and adapted texts in a way that no lay viewer ever would. As
Hutcheon recognises in her work on audiences of adaptations, “This is the
intertextual pleasure in adaptation that some call elitist and that others call
enriching”.13 Hutcheon is at pains to move away from registering such
pleasure as “elitist” and makes a distinction, instead, between what she calls
“knowing” and “unknowing” audiences.14 While her work is commendably
nuanced, however, she fails to properly address the fact that most knowing
audiences are only ever partially knowing audiences and that – beyond using
adaptations as part of pedagogical practice – there may be very little quoti-
dian, social use in thinking through the finer relationships between source
and adapted texts.
In part, then, I want to pick up here some questions that I left unan-
swered in my previous work on postcolonial African film adaptation in
South and West Africa. These questions concern the fact that, in spite of
the existence of extremely intelligent film adaptations of literature by Afri-
can filmmakers, many audiences in Africa are non-literate, or do not have
access to the sources the films adapt, or do not have access to the films
themselves, given the lack of formal cinema spaces and infrastructure in

10 Braudy quoted in Braudy, Leo / Cohen, Marshall (ed.), “Film Genres”, in: Leo Braudy /
Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Oxford 1999, 607–611, 608;
see also Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 121.
11 Emig, Rainer, “Adaptation in Theory”, Unpublished Conference Paper, Adaptation and Cul-
tural Appropriation, Bayreuth University February 2010.
12 Ibid.
13 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 117.
14 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 120–128.

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many African countries.15 This quandary – which is certainly not confined

to African contexts – has led me to think more broadly about what it is that
we do as adaptation scholars, how we might ourselves be implicated in re-
producing distinctions between art and popular cultural production, and
whether we might not expand our horizons to imagine more widespread
forms of apprehension of adaptations and allow those to inflect our own,
generally more esoteric approach. I do not intend to suggest that there is no
place for the expert adaptation scholar; however, as expert adaptation schol-
ars, we do have a responsibility to be aware of our own evaluation proc-
esses, and to be realistic about how limited or broadly applicable our theo-
ries are to everyday practices beyond the conference and the classroom.
Adaptation Studies has been characterised by a fetishisation of repre-
sentation without adequate attention paid to specific sites of reception;
through countless close analyses of individual adaptations, scholars have
sought to understand the intelligence and artistry of adaptation practitioners
in altering source texts into adaptations, or to assume how audiences would
react to such texts (note that Hutcheon16 mostly uses the subjunctive mood
when conjuring audiences). However, this intelligence and artistry usually
becomes illuminated for the adaptation scholar not immediately but only
after many hours of work sourcing, reading and drawing connections. Thus,
even for the adaptation scholar, appreciating an adaptation as an adaptation
does not involve a process of immediate apprehension but rather an ex-
tended and scholarly journey. This journey is more often than not an intel-
lectual one, and can be characterised through Proust’s term ‘voluntary
memory’ – a term elaborated on by Walter Benjamin in “On Some Motifs
in Baudelaire”.17 In contrast, the daily, common responses to adaptations
can be likened to acts of ‘involuntary memory’ – embodied rather than ra-
tional responses – whereby individual memories and experiences (which in
some cases connect with collective memories and experiences) are ignited.
What we are faced with here, then, are competing memory economies. The
scholarly approach to Adaptation Studies puts ‘voluntary memory’ to work,
where the devotion and rationality of the scholar is needed to unpack the
adaptation. On the other hand, the regime of ‘involuntary memory’ is
largely governed by immediate emotional and embodied responses rather
than rationality and intellectuality. In the daily apprehension of adaptations,
the historical excavation of sources by the adaptation scholar gives way to –
at best – a chequered sense of what in the work counts as adaptation and
what does not.

15 Dovey, Lindiwe, African Film and Literature: Adapting Violence to the Screen, New York 2009, 21.
16 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 113–139.
17 Benjamin, Walter, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, in: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London
1992, 152–196.

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But there has been a revolution recently in Adaptation Studies and this
revolution has, to some extent, helped to address the problems raised
above. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s Remediation (1999)18 and Lin-
da Hutcheon’s Theory of Adaptation (2006) have been particularly revolution-
ary in helping to remake the field of Adaptation Studies by broadening the
framework from the traditional focus on literature to film adaptation, to
adaptation within and across all kinds of artistic media, including theatre,
architecture, dance, painting, photography, sculpture, film and new media.
Beyond this, Emig has suggested even more radical new mediums of adap-
tation, including food, fashion, and mobile phones.19 This expanded focus
on all kinds of source and adapted media helps to erode the distinction be-
tween the idea of the high, canonical literary text and the bastardized popu-
lar cultural appropriation; however – in its ongoing attention to mediums
rather than audiences – this focus also fails to forward our understanding
of what adaptation means to a broader, non-academic public, and risks
overlooking the fact that where and when adaptations take place, where and
when they are exhibited, crucially determine how they are apprehended and
defined by viewers. As one art scholar points out, “[T]he real question is
not ‘What objects are (permanently) works of art?’ but ‘When is an object a
work of art?’ – or more briefly […] ‘When is art?’”20 We can adapt these
questions to ask: “When is an adaptation an adaptation?” or “When is
Adaptation?”

Questions of (In)Fidelity
In order to ask the question “When is an adaptation an adaptation?” or
“When is Adaptation?”, we have to return to the much maligned concept of
fidelity. For, along with the broadening of the objects and media deemed wor-
thy of scrutiny within Adaptation Studies, the old question – formulated al-
ready by art historian E.H. Gombrich in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963)21
– of what constitutes an adaptation in the first place, once again rears its head.
As Emig puts it, if everything is acknowledged as adaptation then adaptation
essentially means nothing.22 A struggle is thus at play – one in which a certain
tradition of Adaptation Studies, in which the formal close analysis of particu-
lar adaptations is central, comes into contact with a different, newer tradition
of Adaptation Studies, in which the wider sociological questions raised by

18 Bolter, Jay David / Grusin, Richard, Remediation: Understanding New Media, Boston 1999.
19 Emig, “Adaptation between Intertextuality and Intermediality”.
20 Goodman, Nelson, “When Is Art?”, in: Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Hassocks
1978, 57–70, 66–67.
21 Gombrich, Ernst H., Meditations on a Hobby Horse and other essays on the Theory of Art, Oxford
1963.
22 Emig, “Adaptation between Intertextuality and Intermediality”.

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concepts such as adaptation, appropriation, and transculturation are ex-

plored.
The latter, more recent tradition of Adaptation Studies can bear more
tenuous definitions of what and when adaptation is, but the former cannot.
When it comes to the close analysis of particular adaptations, there has to
be enough of an overlap or correlation – enough fidelity – for the analysis to
be meaningful. Gombrich, in his essay Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the
Roots of the Artistic Form, defines the ‘minimum image’ of an artwork as those
elements that allow us to recognize it as a representation, translation, or
adaptation of something else.23 Similarly, art scholar Göran Sörbom, distin-
guishes subject-matter realism from stylistic realism and points to the neces-
sity of a degree of subject-matter realism for recognition of an imitation or
adaptation. He writes: “When a portrait is made the qualities of the portrait
are decided, to some degree at least, by the actual look of the given model if
there is going to be a portrait at all”.24 In such a way, Gombrich and Sör-
bom draw our attention to the necessity of some form of fidelity in adapta-
tion, and thus the need for some reflection on issues of fidelity (even if it is
not called this) in Adaptation Studies.
The problem, in fact, has never been with fidelity per se; it has been with
the fact that the conditions and contexts of fidelity and infidelity have not
been adequately studied. What is of interest is who demands fidelity (or not),
and when, why, how and for what purposes. Fidelity is not a yardstick against
which to judge individual adaptations but a fulcrum around which to con-
textualise the apprehension and popular meanings of adaptations in diverse
localities. For example, in the contemporary Western context, looking at
how broader ideas around (in)fidelity are being shaped by new technological
developments and the reinvention of humanity itself would seem to be en-
tirely appropriate, just as – in relation to different, African contexts – I have
previously looked at the value of radical infidelity in filmmakers’ need to re-
write histories of exploitation, colonialism and apartheid.25
In The Coming of the Body (2010), French writer and economist Hervé
Juvin argues that, in the West, the pursuit of individual health, security and
pleasure are replacing the pursuit of morality, family and fidelity in a con-
temporary era in which people have become obsessed with prolonging
youth.26 In this process, the body is foregrounded as a machine of desire,
rootless and unaccountable to anything but itself. Adaptation Studies that
would seek to eschew all mention of fidelity would seem to participate in a
similar movement away from its most potent weapon – a historicised and

23 Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, 5.

24 Sörbom, Göran, Mimesis and Art: Studies in the Origin and Early Development of an Aesthetic Vo-
cabulary, Stockholm 1966, 24–25.
25 Dovey, African Film and Literature.
26 Juvin, Hervé, The Coming of the Body, London 2010.

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 Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies 169

contextualised perspective – and towards a fetishisation of the young, the

new, the embodied (stripped of its rationality) and the contemporary (devoid
of history). Popular viewing practices that ignore the historical completely
in lieu of simple immediate apprehension would, it must be acknowledged,
participate in the very same movement. And such a movement would mean
the collapse of historical perspective into a form of contemporary art evalu-
ation, where contemporary art “demonstrates the way in which the contem-
porary as such shows itself – the act of presenting the present” (my emphasis).27
What makes adaptations distinctive is their ability not only to present the
present but also to present the past, to activate histories and memories. If
we are insistent upon continuing to explore adaptation in theory and prac-
tice, we need to find ways of thinking through the old and the new, the past
and the contemporary, and also audiences’ relationship to these co-existent
forces.
How do we deal, then, with the reality that the majority of audiences –
including ourselves, as spectators rather than scholars – have at best an im-
perfect knowledge of the sources being adapted? And, more interestingly
perhaps, how do adaptation practitioners appear to be dealing with this real-
ity? To return to Emig’s question, how consciously does intertextuality
work? And how important is it to adaptation practitioners that audiences
recognise and apprehend their works as adaptations? Are there ways of in-
vesting a work with the traits of adaptation without relying on audience’s
perfect knowledge of the sources? In the section that follows, I want to ex-
plore these questions while tentatively suggesting what seems to me an
emergent form of adaptation, one that could perhaps be read as an attempt
by practitioners to meet everyday audiences of adaptations halfway. This
emergent form of adaptation would seem to invoke both an embodied and
rational response, but does not require of the audience a long and pro-
tracted engagement after the event to experience the pleasures of adapta-
tion. Indeed, in some cases, the sources are tangential or only briefly
touched upon. I want to call this new form of adaptation ‘simultaneous
adaptation.’

Simultaneous Adaptation
Hutcheon points out that “often, the audience will recognize that a work is an
adaptation of more than one specific text”28 but here she is referring to re-
make adaptations, where the film remake adapts both the original novel and

27 Groys, Boris, Topology of Contemporary Art, 2005–2007, http://xz.gif.ru/numbers/digest-2005-

2007/topology-of-contemporary-art/view_print/ (accessed 14 September 2010); I would like
to thank Neal MacInnes for drawing my attention to Boris Groys’s work.
28 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, 21.

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earlier film adaptations of it. She does not examine adaptations in which two
or more very different source texts are simultaneously adapted, drawn into
the same frame. Neither does African film scholar Mbye Cham examine this
practice in his article “Oral Traditions, Literature, and Cinema in Africa”, in
which he designates a category of adaptation “thrice-told tales”, referring to
film adaptations where the adapter simultaneously adapts a literary text and
the oral narrative on which that text is based.29 In the other essays in this col-
lection, one can find widespread recognition of new forms of adaptation –
such as remixing, and mash-ups – that do incorporate two or more very differ-
ent texts into one adaptation. Such forms of adaptation can be grouped under
the umbrella term “simultaneous adaptation.”
If the process of remaking a single text is a complex act that questions
the value, uniqueness and internal stability of that very text, then one would
imagine that the process of simultaneously adapting two or more distinct
texts is even more of a decentring, exploding process. Theoretically, this
process leads us back historically, to Barthes’, Bakhtin’s, and Kristeva’s work
on postmodern intertextuality in the 1960s,30 but also forward, to an in-
creasingly mediated and dispersed cultural economy in which what Toffler
envisioned already in the 1980s31 as ‘prosumers’ are rapidly eroding divi-
sions between expert and fan cultures, production and consumption, and
high and low art.32 And although simultaneous adaptations have not largely
been the focus of contemporary Adaptation Studies, research on “intertex-
tuality; analyses of the endless intersections between filmic, literary and oth-
er forms; and a move away from the privileging of literary source texts, have
been among the notable features of [the] revolution” in the field.33
In a very general sense, and returning to the question of reception, the
advantage of simultaneous adaptation would seem to be that, in the drawing
together of two or more originals into the adaptation, the creative tension
between or among these originals provides the kind of intellectual pleasure
to spectators that adaptation scholars enjoy while decoding adaptations over
time. Spectators are hereby asked to simultaneously measure two or more
originals against one another rather than consider how the adaptation is an
adaptation of those originals. This process originates not in an assumed fidel-
ity but in finding fidelity through drawing parallels between and among the
presented texts; in essence, the viewer becomes a prosumer who creates his

29 Cham, Mbye, “Oral Traditions, Literature, and Cinema in Africa”, in: Robert Stam / Alessan-
dra Raengo (ed.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Malden,
Oxford 2005, 295–312.
30 See Emig, this volume.
31 Toffler, Alvin, The Third Wave, New York 1980.
32 See also Voigts-Virchow, this volume.
33 Strong, Jeremy, “Sweetening Jane: Equivalence through Genre, and the Problem of Class in
Austen Adaptations”, in: Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1.3 (2008): 205–219, 205.

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/ her own associations through the process of viewing. The viewer’s possi-
ble awareness of – or involuntary memory of – the sources of these multiple
texts may or may not inflect his / her apprehension and understanding of
the work.
Installation art is, arguably, the form best equipped to deal with such
simultaneity and it is a form that has, in fact, been likened to adaptation:
The installation demonstrates a certain selection, a certain chain of choices, a certain
logic of inclusions and exclusions. And by doing so an installation manifests here and
now certain decisions about what is old and what is new, what is an original and what
is a copy.34
In other words, installations lay bare – according to Groys – the processes of
revaluation active in adaptation. My interest in what follows is how artists
who operate within self-consciously postcolonial paradigms have recently
turned to the mode of simultaneous adaptation through the medium of in-
stallation to question what constitutes the old and the new, the original and
the derivative, the postcolonial and the popular, the author and the audience.
I will argue that, in this form of simultaneous adaptation, sources do not re-
main intact (as in many mash-ups, as Voigts-Virchow shows),35 but are rather
used to inflect and conflict with one another. I am concerned, then, in this
exploration, with what I see as being new kinds of cross-cultural encounters
– staged through bringing distinct sources into confrontation with one anoth-
er – in an era of globalisation, and of increasing simultaneity rather than sim-
ulation.

Simultaneous Adaptation, the Postcolonial, and the Popular

Around the time that George Bluestone’s seminal text Novels into Film (1957)
suggested the autonomy of the field of Adaptation Studies, a new field of in-
quiry – Postcolonial Studies – was also coming into being and, like Adapta-
tion Studies, challenging the bias and arrogance of the field of English Litera-
ture, but from an entirely new angle. Whereas the initial legitimising project
of Adaptation Studies involved establishing the equality of film and literature
as media, Postcolonial Studies saw its project – as far as literature was con-
cerned – as deconstructing and remaking the canon, and showing how can-
onical texts had been creatively appropriated by non-Western writers. Until
recently, however, and in spite of their similar goals, Adaptation Studies and
Postcolonial Studies have remained relatively discrete, not allowing the in-
sights of the one to potentially remake the other. It has been my intention
here, as elsewhere, to try to bring these two fields into conversation with one
another. In my analysis of the specific cultural works that I have chosen to

34 Groys, Topology of Contemporary Art.

35 Cf. Voigts-Virchow, this volume.

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172 Lindiwe Dovey

focus on here, I hope to show what has been lost through the lack of a deep
engagement with postcolonial processes of remaking in Adaptation Studies,
which has constructed its own, largely Anglo-American canon. However, I
will also argue that the ways in which Adaptation Studies scholars have been
quick to welcome popular cultural products as worthy objects of analysis can
be used to challenge the self-consciously intellectual and political remit Post-
colonial Studies scholars have tended to set for themselves and which risks,
on occasion, fomenting normative modes of analysis.
What are the specific benefits of simultaneous adaptation for practi-
tioners working in a self-consciously postcolonial paradigm? As I have pre-
viously argued, postcolonial African film adapters seem to have turned to
adaptation due to its mimetic potential – its ability to encourage in audien-
ces both embodied and rational responses – through their radical updating
of historical sources and literary / operatic / oral texts.36 Simultaneous
adaptation offers similar mimetic potential, but does so in a way that does
not necessarily require a knowledge of the adapted sources. Rather, intellec-
tual exertion is encouraged in viewers by the juxtaposition of the two or
more distinct sources within one single installation. In many cases, these
postcolonial installation works’ status as adaptations is tenuous at best, rais-
ing questions about what exactly is being adapted. In a broad sense, the
deep source of these works is the fact of colonialism and its associated dis-
courses, and the adaptation represents the rewriting of bowdlerised colonial
narratives that erase black / non-Western histories. This is why one can re-
fer to these works as self-consciously postcolonial.
The act of interpretation of historical events via mediated archives, and
a questioning of the authority of authorship, have been central to John
Akomfrah’s work, and what one finds in Mnemosyne and the film, Nine Muses
(2011) wich can be seen as another version of it, adapted for a cinema
rather than gallery audience, is a sonorous rewriting of the textual and mate-
rial history of the West Midlands in England. Alongside the (acknowledged)
quotations from canonical and non-canonical texts and the (unacknowl-
edged) quotations from classical music mentioned above, Akomfrah in-
cludes a 1964 prayer recited at Bethel Baptist Church in Handsworth (re-
minding the knowing viewer of Akomfrah’s previous work Handsworth
Songs), Leontyne Price’s vocal incarnation of the American Negro spiritual
song “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child”, and Paul Robeson’s recita-
tion of Moses’ speech “Let my people go” from the Old Testament (itself
reincarnated in the American Negro spiritual song “Go Down Moses”). In
this way, Mnemosyne – the title of which notably refers to the Greek muse of
memory – offers up an intellectual experience, a simultaneity of quotation,
for the viewer to make his / her own meaning from. There is an acceptance

36 Dovey, African Film and Literature.

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here of the fickleness of memory – which may be voluntary or involuntary

– and the ways in which memory is officially constructed and determined,
and thus an openness to the ways in which viewers are inevitably going to
re-make the work in their own minds. Indeed, the fact that Akomfrah him-
self has made two versions of the work – the gallery installation and the
feature film – suggests that authors themselves are constantly re-making
their works (actually and imaginatively), and that the ‛final work’ that audi-
ences see in formal spaces B just one version of a potentially infinite ar-
rangement of images, sounds, and ideas. Less important, then, than the de-
tails of particular sources are the larger questions that Mnemosyne invites us
to ponder around history and memory and migration; notably, in its remak-
ing of white British history, the installation forms part of a broader project
that explores “how England makes art and art makes England”.37 Beyond
the intellectual, Akomfrah also provides us with an emotional and sensory
experience – images, sounds, and sources coming together – and this emo-
tional, sensory experience depends primarily on the power of simultaneity.
Whether we recognise the individual quotations throughout or not is not
important; it is the overall effect of the simultaneous presentation of these
literary quotations that has an emotional and intellectual impact. They con-
jure a sense of a lost past – a history and a memory just beyond our reach –
as captured in the Basho quotation used by Akomfrah: “Every day is a jour-
ney and the journey itself is home.”
Installation work, however, serves very different purposes in different
contexts and in relation to different imagined audiences; in terms of the hy-
permediated Western audience that concerns Bolter and Grusin, and Juvin,
the choice of the esoteric form of installation seems to be a symptom of the
need to slow down processes of reflection and to rematerialise medium and
mediation. Bolter and Grusin put at the centre of their study a theoretical
conundrum – the fact that “Our culture wants both to multiply its media
and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the
very act of multiplying them”.38 Remediation, they argue, is a term that ad-
dresses “our culture’s contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hyper-
mediacy”.39 This is not only an argument about contemporary digital cul-
ture, however; it applies, they argue, to “the last several hundred years of
Western visual representation”40 and artists’ “attempts to achieve immedi-
acy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of medi-
ation” (1999: 11).41

37 BFI, Exhibition brochure, 2010.

38 Bolter / Grusin, Remediation, 5.
39 Ibid.
40 Bolter / Grusin, Remediation, 11.
41 Ibid.

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174 Lindiwe Dovey

But Bolter and Grusin’s arguments are difficult to apply in many Afri-
can contexts, for example, where the media – and certainly new media – are
not nearly as pervasive as in the West. Certain questions arise, then, from
encountering such thinking, such as where one is to situate black British ar-
tists such as Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, who are based in the West but have
links to elsewhere, and what we are to make of the fact that they are ex-
pressing themselves through the rather esoteric and inaccessible form of in-
stallation art. We might also ask where we should situate installation art
makers such as the Russian collective AES+F, who are not technically West-
ern or non-Western, but whose work falls quite easily within a postcolonial
framework.
We seem to move, in the work of such postcolonial artists, beyond
questions of immediacy, hypermediacy and simulation, to the simultaneity
of their experiences (which usually embrace both Western and non-Western
sites) and the contradictions that those experiences bring into focus. There
is no culture today – Western or non-Western – that is not affected by the
presence of the Other, or of others living simultaneously in overlapping,
sometimes parallel ways. These artists reveal to us, through simultaneous
adaptation and usually (although not always) through the device of multiple
screens, an era of globalisation that is simultaneously postcolonial and colo-
nial, democratic and oppressive. Furthermore, these artists would seem to
confirm what Bill Schwarz says in his stringent critique of normative ver-
sions of postcolonialism: “To think historically requires forsaking the singu-
lar abstraction […] of ‘the postcolonial’ [… and] working through the polit-
ical configurations of specific conjunctures”.42 Forsaking the singular in lieu
of the simultaneous, and the local in favour of the conjunctural, is what
these postcolonial installation adaptations do. Perhaps there is no better ex-
pression of these conjunctural forms of (post)coloniality than AES+F’s
work The Feast of Trimalchio (2010),43 a three-screen installation work com-
posed of thousands of animated photographs. A part adaptation of a sec-
tion of the lyric Roman poet Gaius Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon, adapted al-
so by Federico Fellini in 1969, the Russian collective sought a twenty-first
century equivalent for the exploitative imperial pleasure and privilege exer-
cised by Trimalchio in the original. The result is a profound consideration
of race, exoticism, class, pleasure, and slave / master relationships in a con-
temporary capitalist, image-conscious world, not unlike the one conjured in
Juvin’s The Coming of the Body.
In thinking through the simultaneous existence of forms of colonialism
and postcolonialism, exploitation and freedom, in the contemporary world,

42 Schwarz, Bill, “Actually existing postcolonialism”, in: Radical Philosophy November / December
(2000): 16–24, 17.
43 The Feast of Trimalchio, film installation, AES+F, 2010.

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there is a need to once again return to the question of the popular and to its
relationship to the postcolonial. The postcolonial cannot escape its status as
a politicised term; Postcolonial Studies is inherently and by definition inter-
ested in colonial exploitation, the traces of the colonial in the present, and
in identifying and critiquing new forms of imperialism. But can the self-con-
sciously postcolonial work simultaneously be popular? If we use Isaac Ju-
lien’s work Fantôme Creole (2005)44 as a way of attempting to answer this
question, the response is invariably bleak; for Fantôme Creole reflects – via
simultaneity – on the inaccessible nature of its postcolonial position.
In much the same way that Akomfrah attempts to remake the bowdler-
ised history of white Britain in Mnemosyne / Nine Muses, Julien in Fantôme Cre-
ole rewrites the narrative of the discovery of the North Pole; at the same
time, however, he explores the chasm between this rewriting and his in-
tended audiences. The rewriting of the North Pole narrative occurs in True
North (2004), the first half of his two-part installation Fantôme Creole (2005).
He tells the story not of Robert Peary, but of his African American partner,
Matthew Henson (1866–1955), who joined him on the voyage in 1909 and
who published, in 1912, the work A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. Julien
goes even further than this, however, to make the actor who impersonates
Henson in his three-screen film installation an African American woman.
True North thus reminds us, in installation form, what postcolonialism, fem-
inism, and postmodernism have only been able to teach us about in an ab-
stract way: the danger of the single story. This was the title of a recent talk
by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who argues that the single
story that has been constructed of Africa largely derives from Western liter-
ature.45 This single story comes not only from literature, however, but also
from colonial films about Africa and black people, many of which were
adaptations,46 and from contemporary Western news media. All of these
Western discourses have contributed to what Homi Bhabha has called colo-
nial discourse, discourse that is unstable only in that it attempts to fix a sin-
gle story of Africa and black people into place. And the prevalence and har-
diness of this single story makes the power of simultaneity harnessed by
Julien and other postcolonial artists all the more vital.
What is so striking about Akomfrah’s and Julien’s work is that it insists
that a single story exists neither about Africa nor the West, neither about
colonialism nor postcolonialism, neither about the past nor the present. Ju-
lien does this by drawing together simultaneously not only the multiple sto-
ries within the narrative of the discovery of the North Pole, but also

44 Fantôme Creole, dir. Isaac Julien, 2005.

45 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, The danger of a single story, 2009, http://www.ted.com/talks/chi-
mamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (accessed 14 September 2010).
46 Dovey, African Film and Literature.

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176 Lindiwe Dovey

through his juxtaposition of two geographical locations – made possible by

his use of the installation medium – which allows for a commentary on the
work’s own contingent status as postcolonial art. Julien achieved this by
coupling True North in exhibition with another of his works, Fantôme Afrique
(2005), set in Burkina Faso. Together the exhibition was appropriately called
Fantôme Creole.
The juxtaposition of True North and Fantôme Afrique produces not only
an emotional and sensory response, although the formal contrasts of snow
and dust, icy blues and luscious reds, are engaging in an embodied way.
Rather, Fantôme Afrique renders True North a contingent postcolonial work
of art in the way it raises questions about the inaccessibility of the entire in-
stallation to many audiences in Africa. In its specific focus on images of cin-
emas, and in its reflections on cinema’s importance, or rather lack of impor-
tance, in Burkina Faso, Fantôme Afrique explores the mutual exclusivity of
the postcolonial and the popular in this context.
Burkina Faso is considered the birthplace of “African Cinema” and is
the location of FESPACO, the largest and longest-running African film fes-
tival in the world, which celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2009. Ouaga-
dougou is the only city in the world to have a monument to its country’s
filmmakers. And yet, cinemas are in decline throughout sub-Saharan Africa,
partly due to the neo-colonial infrastructure that has determined what films
have been shown since the 1960s, and partly due to cinemas being turned
into mosques, churches and supermarkets. African film made on celluloid –
what has and can unproblematically be called postcolonial African cinema –
can in no way be referred to as a popular art form in Africa, in spite of the
optimism of the earliest filmmakers that this would be the case. Instead,
Nollywood and the video industries have eclipsed “African Cinema” in im-
portance, inspiring interesting forms of locally produced cultural appropria-
tions that have been avidly consumed by local viewers throughout the con-
tinent.
The kind of self-conscious postcolonial remaking undertaken by artists
such as Isaac Julien, then, who work with celluloid film and aim to have
their work shown in cinemas or galleries, is not widely accessible to the gen-
eral public, either in the West, or outside of the West. Julien’s Fantôme Creole
(2005), by incorporating images of empty cinemas within an installation that
simultaneously seeks to rewrite a bowdlerised colonial narrative, thus seems
to reflect on the lack of this kind of postcolonial art reaching a broader pop-
ular audience at this point in time. This does not mean, however, that the
work is inherently artistic rather than popular. The spaces in which cultural
productions are exhibited play a significant role in affecting how these pro-
ductions are classified and in the solidification of genres, something which –
I have shown – Fantôme Creole itself reflects on.

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Towards a Post-humanism: Identity of the Soul

Many postcolonial installations that remake colonial or imperial narratives
often reject the kind of meaning-making that accompanies linear narratives,
presumably wanting to shun the grand narratives of colonialism itself. There
are two potential problems with such an approach, however. The first is that
the postcolonial always already implies resistance, and therefore does not man-
age to overcome the colonial. This is both the weapon and the weakness of a
postcolonial approach, for the postcolonial keeps the colonial and its influen-
ces alive just as it seeks to banish them. The second problem with this coun-
ter-narrative approach is that it risks aestheticising the sensory and the em-
bodied at the expense of the rational, thereby threatening to contribute to an
endlessly contemporary culture with no historical depth. One finds this prob-
lem at work in the fourteen-screen installation work of French-Algerian artist
Zineb Sedira, presented first at Iniva, Rivington Place, in London in 2009,
and titled Floating Coffins. Sedira claims, in the exhibition literature, that the
installation is about migrancy; however, without any narrative, or reference to
or juxtaposition of prior narratives or stories (as in the work of Akomfrah,
Julien, and AES+F), the beautiful images of birds, ships, sea, and sand on the
coast of Mauritania fail to provide a journey for the viewer, who is simply
lulled into complacency or boredom.
In the final section of this essay, I want to focus on an example of an
adaptation that moves beyond both of these problems, while also giving a
sense of the possibilities of simultaneous adaptation. Identity of the Soul is a
five-screen cinematic event that was created by Norwegian director Thomas
Høegh in 2009.47 It simultaneously adapts Henrik Ibsen’s Terje Vigen (1862),
a little-known poem globally but one that is fundamental to Norwegian na-
tional identity, and the poem A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies (1967) by Mah-
moud Darwish, the former Palestinian national poet who passed away in
August 2008, just before Identity of the Soul had its international premiere in
Ramallah. Although what Høegh simultaneously adapts here is poetry, these
are narrative poems. And although each of these poems is extremely well
known in its own territory, what is more important than the ways in which
Identity of the Soul adapts either of them, is how each of the poems relates to,
adapts, and inflects the other. “Both poems,” as Høegh points out, “have
parallel and complementary themes of retaliation and reconciliation” (bro-
chure), and thus if any link is drawn between their respective nations of ori-
gin – Norway and Palestine – it is a link not based on a former relationship
of dominance and oppression but one of commonality of human experi-
ence.

47 Identity of the Soul, dir. Thomas Høegh, 2009.

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Set in 1809 and published in 1862, Terje Vigen is about a Norwegian

fisherman, Terje Vigen, whose family is starving during the Napoleonic
wars, when the English rule the waters between Norway and Denmark.
Terje Vigen tries to sail out past the enemy to find food for his family but is
captured and imprisoned by an English captain. Five years later, when Terje
Vigen is released from prison, he sails home to find that his wife and child
are dead. He vows that he will avenge their deaths. However, at the end of
the poem, many years later, he shows mercy on the very Englishman who
imprisoned him.
Norway’s national poem, Terje Vigen has been adapted to screen many
times, the most well-known version being the 1917 film by the Swedish di-
rector and actor Victor Sjöström. Boasting the largest budget of any Swed-
ish film up until then, it was clearly intended to cement a regional identity at
a time when Scandinavia was establishing a reputation of neutrality for itself
in relation to the rest of the world during WWI. Ibsen’s poem has inspired
several contemporary film adaptations – among them an amateurish You-
Tube production by Norwegian teenagers – but it is difficult to find a more
striking contemporary version than Identity of the Soul. However, in spite of
Terje Vigen’s canonicity in Norway, it is little known outside the country.
Even Vanessa Redgrave, who is the English narrator of Identity of the Soul,
and who has performed almost every Ibsen role, had not heard of it previ-
ously.48 And before the project, Darwish had not previously encountered
the poem either.
What is interesting about Terje Vigen in the context of Ibsen’s oeuvre is
that, whereas Ibsen’s theatre is appreciated only by a bourgeois audience in
Norway, Terje Vigen cuts across class. In composing the poem, Ibsen appa-
rently spoke to many people who had experienced the grain shortage of
1809, and he incorporated these experiences into the narrative of Terje Vig-
en.49 Dockworkers are able to recite the poem from heart; it is learned in
the home and at school; and people organise summer island retreats to do
their own dramatic re-enactments of it. The appeal of the poem for Norwe-
gians appears to reside partly in its emotional construction of a national
pride and consciousness, and partly in its themes of survival against the
odds. In Norway, with its history of people trekking towards rather than
away from the ice and snow, there remains a strong belief that the natural
elements contribute to and have an impact on human destiny; Norwegians
appreciate the theme of equality in Terje Vigen, where the powerful English-
man is stripped down to his humanity. In both its content and its popular
national appeal, Terje Vigen engages in an act of levelling that erodes distinc-

48 Høegh, Thomas, Skype interview with author, 26 July 2010.

49 Ibid.

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tions between the high and the popular. In fact, it was this lack of class dis-
tinction in the poem that primarily appealed to Høegh.50
A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies has had a much more controversial his-
tory, having been rejected by people from both sides of the Israel-Palestine
conflict. Rather than casting a Palestinian as victim – in the way that Terje
Vigen casts a Norwegian as victim to an imperious Englishman – Darwish
shows empathy for an Israeli soldier in the poem, which is based on a dis-
cussion Darwish had with an Israeli soldier. This move by Darwish is as
much an act of giving away power as Terje Vigen’s mercy on the English-
man is in Ibsen’s poem. After all, Darwish’s family was expelled from their
home village of al-Birwa in Western Galilee by the Israeli army in 1948 and
was never able to return. A deep sense of loss and exile thus pervades all of
Darwish’s work. One can imagine the shock when Darwish, who was
greatly loved and admired by the Palestinian people and whose death in-
spired three days of national mourning, elected not to promote revenge but
reconciliation in A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies. And even though the collec-
tion in which this poem appears is titled Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, creat-
ing a likeness between Palestine and Eden, Darwish suggests a generous,
tenuous relationship between home and land in the poem. The narrator in
the poem asks the Israeli soldier, “And the land?” and the soldier responds,
“I don’t know the land. … I don’t feel it in my flesh and blood …” The
land is not ultimately home for this soldier; in fact, home for him is invisi-
ble, capable of summoning only through the other senses, as expressed at
the end of the poem (a part repetition of the beginning):
He said goodbye and went looking for white lilies,
a bird welcoming the dawn on an olive branch.
He understands things only as he senses and smells them.
Homeland for him, he said, is to drink my mother’s coffee, to return, safely,
at nightfall.51
There is an acceptance, here, on Darwish’s part, that perhaps home is more
complex than his family’s lost land, as tragic and oppressive as the act of seiz-
ure that stripped him of that land was; home is something that is always
slightly elusive, something that has to do with sensation and relationship,
something which he strives towards in his poetry. To repeat the Basho quota-
tion used by Akomfrah in Mnemosyne: “Every day is a journey and the journey
itself is home.” Although he was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Or-
ganisation (PLO), Darwish always maintained a vision of equality and be-

50 Ibid.
51 This is the version used in Identity of the Soul. See Darwish, Mahmoud, A Soldier Dreams of White
Lilies, 1967, http://www.identityofthesoul.com/Identity_of_the_Soul_Poetry.html to down-
load (accessed 14 September 2010).

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180 Lindiwe Dovey

lieved in the possibility of peace in Israel / Palestine. Unsurprisingly, after

screenings of Identity of the Soul, discussions – both live and online – have re-
volved around the themes of revenge and reconciliation.
Notably, when Høegh met with Darwish to first propose the project,
Darwish was initially sceptical. As Høegh says, “There have been attempts
to misuse Darwish … [but] when he realised that I was interested in the
poetry, things changed” (Høegh 2010). Arabic poetry has a long history, and
poetry is taken extremely seriously in Palestine, which partly explains Darw-
ish’s stature there. But Darwish also “fell in love with the Ibsen”;52 it was
the Ibsen that convinced him to come on board, that made him realise that
Identity of the Soul was not an isolated project but something much larger, in
its simultaneous bringing together of two important poems – from two dis-
tinct contexts – both promoting a message of peace.
The brochure for Identity of the Soul describes it as being “set against a
backdrop of stunning images filmed around the world and an original fu-
sion soundtrack of Scandinavian and Arabian influences and contemporary
electronic rhythms.” This description, however, being written, cannot possi-
bly do justice to the sensory experience of the installation. Identity of the Soul
plays out across five large, split screens (which sometimes display different,
and sometimes continuous, images) and which form a conspiratorial con-
cave towards the audience. The effect here, interestingly, combines the pop-
ular experience of an all-immersing visit to an IMAX cinema with the more
rarefied experience of witnessing a once-off video installation in an art gal-
lery. The show has garnered strong emotional responses in Palestine and
Israel (where it was screened outdoors in eight cities, to a total audience of
22,000 people), in Qatar, in Jordan, in the UK, and in Norway (where it was
shown in an old paper mill in Ibsen’s birth town of Skien). Through these
free screenings Høegh has striven to bring the posthumanist message of
Identity of the Soul to a broad audience, and to resuscitate the popularity of
the original poems in new contexts. As the Qatar Tribune has pointed out,
“Identity of the Soul immerses the audience in music, imagery and poetry; all
designed to assault and seduce them, on a scale that is intensely emotional,
sensitive and thought provoking” (quoted in Identity of the Soul brochure).
This installation, through its simultaneous adaptation of the two narrative
poems which it brings into contact, thus maintains the necessary rationality
(attested to here by the description of it as “thought provoking”) while also
creating an “immersive” and “seductive” experience for the body.
The seductive experience engendered by Identity of the Soul is quite ob-
vious; but what is so “thought provoking” about the installation requires
more analysis. The effect of the choice to simultaneously adapt these two
particular poems is quite dramatic, given that they are separated from each

52 Høegh, Skype interview with author.

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other by more than a century and come from contexts that, at first glance,
could not be more dissimilar. And yet, as Adichie says, it is not the differ-
ences between two separate stories, but rather what she calls the single story
that “emphasises how we are different rather than how we are similar”.53
Høegh’s overarching point – that we are all, despite our great differences,
the same in that we are human – in fact precisely depends on bringing to-
gether two distinct stories simultaneously. The fact that we can find similar-
ity across such vast expanses of temporal and geographical difference is
what is so fundamentally moving about Identity of the Soul. At the end of her
talk, Adichie says: “When we reject the single story, when we realise that
there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise”.54
In spite of Terje Vigen’s loss at the hands of the Englishman, in spite of
Darwish’s loss at the hands of the Israeli army, paradise is thus momentarily
regained through the way in which Identity of the Soul remakes a single story
into a multi-faceted story; in the way in which it remakes two national, hu-
manist narratives into a transnational, posthumanist narrative. And in a
global filmmaking context in which many non-Western filmmakers adapt
Western canonical texts, but where many Western filmmakers do not adapt
non-Western texts of any kind, we find here a Norwegian director who has
taken a poem celebrating his own national identity, and deconstructed it by
suturing it together with an important Palestinian poem that explores very
similar themes.
And yet there is no naïve assumption here that multiple human stories
can ever – or should ever – be merged into one single human story. While
faithful to the ‘word’ of the poems, Høegh’s form – the subtle fracturing of
the images across the five screens – suggests the ultimate impossibility of
closed narratives. Furthermore, rather than use subtitles, Høegh made six
different versions of the show in six different languages – English, Arabic
(narrated by Darwish himself), Norwegian, French, Hebrew, and Urdu – to
allow viewers to feel at home in their own language. The arrogance of the
singularity of the grand narrative of Western humanism is thus decon-
structed by the simultaneous adaptation of Terje Vigen and A Soldier Dreams
of White Lilies. This deconstruction is not so much postcolonial as it is post-
humanist, however, in that – as the title Identity of the Soul indicates – the
search here is for a form of posthumanism which is “more human in recog-
nizing its own specific limits and location”.55 The attempt here, as in Akom-
frah’s and Julien’s work, seems to be to deconstruct the exclusive Western

53 Adichie, The danger of a single story.

54 Ibid.
55 Chambers, Iaian, “Unrealized Democracy and a Posthumanist Art”, in: Okwui Enwezor et al
(ed.), Democracy Unrealized: Documenta11 Platform1, Cantz 2002, 169–176, 173.

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182 Lindiwe Dovey

humanism of the past while simultaneously remaking it in a more inclusive

sense that draws on non-Western perspectives.

(No) Conclusion: The Remaking of Adaptation Studies

Adaptation scholars have pointed out “what an exciting period it is for Adap-
tation Studies, a critical area which is evidently moving from being a ‘niche’
topic to becoming a discipline in its own right”.56 While I agree wholeheart-
edly with such celebration, I think we do need to ask what potentially may be
lost by Adaptation Studies becoming a discrete discipline rather than a trou-
bling discourse on the margins of a number of disciplines in the Humanities.
As I have argued here, one of the most revolutionary insights adaptation
scholars have brought to bear on other fields is the contingency and incom-
pleteness of the unique artwork, and the produced rather than intrinsic nature
of what constitutes high and popular art. The idea of culture being a constant
process of remaking is fundamental to Adaptation Studies, and thus not to
recognise the contingency and incompleteness of adaptations themselves –
or indeed, of Adaptation Studies itself – would be to sabotage the essence of
why Adaptation Studies matters within the Humanities.
And Adaptation Studies is, undoubtedly, in the process of a seismic re-
making, given the arrival at a critical mass of scholarship and of scholars
interested in exploring questions of adaptation. While it is not my intention
to prescribe the nature of this remaking, I have suggested throughout this
essay two areas that have been somewhat neglected within Adaptation Stud-
ies, and that might be brought more into purview in this remaking: the rela-
tionship between Western and non-Western sources and adaptations; and
the relationship between adaptation and audience. I have attempted to ex-
plore these relationships here in the context of contemporary works –
Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne / Nine Muses, Julien’s Fantôme Creole, and Høegh’s
Identity of the Soul – which reflect on the very same questions. Mnemosyne and
Fantôme Creole are simultaneous adaptations which are self-consciously post-
colonial; they participate in the broad move to remake bowdlerised, colonial
narratives by simultaneously introducing Black points of view. The remaking
of canonical Western texts by both Westerners and non-Westerners has
been a very important first step in decolonising the practice of adaptation,
which has at times perpetuated conservative histories. However, this postco-
lonial work – by fashioning itself as resistant to colonialism – does not man-
age to fully shift the gaze to new sites of production that may have nothing
to do with colonial traces. Furthermore, while such adaptations might re-
flect on their own problematic status as postcolonial art that is dissociated

56 Hand, Richard / Krebs, Katja, “Editorial”, in: Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 1.3
(2008): 173–175, 173.

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 Fidelity, Simultaneity and the ‘Remaking’ of Adaptation Studies 183

from broad popular consumption – as does Fantôme Creole – they do not

attempt, either in content or in exhibition approach, to erode the gap be-
tween postcolonial art and popular apprehension.
Identity of the Soul, on the other hand, overcomes such problems in very
creative ways. First of all, it reminds us that the flow, appropriation and
adaptation of narratives are never unilinear. As one leading African scholar
has pointed out,
discourses of cultural globalization have encouraged quite egregious intellectual
speculation and sloppiness, whereby it is claimed, the juggernaut of American popu-
lar culture is pulverizing cultures across the world and homogenizing them, that peo-
ple in the vulnerable South are abandoning their archaic pastimes in pursuit of Amer-
ican coke and cinema, Macdonalds and Madonna, as if, indeed, they spend their en-
tire day consuming or craving these leisure commodities, or are incapable of process-
ing and interpreting them through the complex filters and registers of their own cul-
tures and leisure practices and traditions.57
Indeed, there have been, since the invention of cinema, illuminating adapta-
tions and cultural appropriations occurring within the non-Western world
which draw on non-Western sources.58 These adaptations, like Identity of the
Soul, prove that the itineraries of adaptation and cultural appropriation practi-
ces are not solely Western, nor do they operate from the “West to the rest”,
but often involve intercultural interpretation within and across a broad variety
of contexts. And yet, such non-Western adaptations – and an adaptation such
as Identity of the Soul which simultaneously adapts two culturally distinct texts –
have largely been ignored in Adaptation Studies, which has overwhelmingly
created an Anglo-American canon for itself.
Such adaptations have much to teach us not only about how different
people in different parts of the world adapt and culturally appropriate texts,
but also about how audiences in different parts of the world apprehend
adaptations. In making Identity of the Soul, Høegh specifically chose two texts
that were popular within their respective homelands (and so might activate
the involuntary memories of certain viewers) but that also speak to each
other in interesting ways, so that viewers with imperfect knowledge of the
originals can still engage in the intellectual process of experiencing two texts
meeting with and inflecting one another. While I am not by any means sug-
gesting that simultaneous adaptation is the way forward in cultures where
history and the texts of the past are being forgotten, I do think that it is
interesting to consider the ways in which such simultaneous adaptation ap-
pears to be attempting to reinvest the apprehension of contemporary art

57 Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe, “Introduction: The Creation and Consumption of Leisure: Theoretical
and Methodological Considerations”, in: Paul Tiyambe Zeleza / Cassandra Rachel Veney (ed.),
Leisure in Urban Africa, Trenton 2003, vii-xxxix, xxvii.
58 Dovey, Lindiwe, “Film and Postcolonial Writing”, Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature,
Cambridge UP, ed. by Ato Quayson, chapter 32, pp. 1039–1067.

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184 Lindiwe Dovey

with a degree of rationality. Finally, although choosing as his medium the

rather esoteric form of screen installation, which is difficult to circulate
widely, Høegh refused to allow this form to determine the status of his
work as high art. Instead, he undertook to bring the work to a large audi-
ence throughout the world. In this way, the question of whether Identity of the
Soul is a work of high or popular art loses relevance; what becomes impor-
tant is the act of human remaking which allows us, as adaptation scholars,
to take the pulse of our times, and to explore how our times interact with
the past, in that never-ending process of remaking that we call culture.

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