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theses

This dissertation brings cinematic adaptation to bear on the question of how nineteenth-century imperial ideologies of “improvement” continue to inform power inequalities in a global capitalist age. Not simply the promotion of general betterment for all, improvement in the British colonial context licensed a superior “master race” to “uplift” its colonized populations, morally, socially, and economically. The project argues that, on the one hand, adaptations reveal the coercion and arrogance that underpin contemporary notions of development, humanitarianism, and modernity—improvement’s post-Victorian guises. On the other hand, the films also use their colonial-era source texts to criticize these same legacies of imperialism. By bringing together cinematic adaptation and postcolonial studies—two fields that rarely converse—I demonstrate that adaptation, as both method and cultural product, provides a new direction for postcolonial criticism. The adaptations I examine represent postcolonial, British, and American films that relocate and update the plotlines of classic novels to postcolonial societies in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. These films detect not only the persistence of the Enlightenment ideology of improvement and its imperial manifestations, but also the critiques of improvement ideology in their source texts that can be used to challenge that ideology in its new forms. I trace the development of improvement discourse’s main assumptions, specifically its conceptions of temporality and spatiality, as they merged with early English capitalism, and then how they influenced British imperial policy after the major indigenous revolutions of the 1850s and 1860s. Each chapter demonstrates that British fiction provides useful strategies of resistance against the improvement ideology that continues to structure postcolonial realities. Pairing Jane Austen’s novels with Bollywood adaptations and Jane Eyre with Jacques Tourneur’s wartime thriller, I Walked with a Zombie, I claim that improvement ideology’s alignment with capitalist values informs post-independence notions of economic development in India and the West Indies. Pairing Rudyard Kipling’s and John Huston’s versions of The Man Who Would Be King and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles with Michael Winterbottom’s Trishna, I claim that Victorian self-improvement—and its inextricability from the forced development of colonized populations—underlies Anglo-American notions of conquest and modernity well into the twenty-first century.

ETD_6246

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Vivian Yuan Kao

doi:10.7282/T3Q52RGG

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.