Adaptations from the Semi-Periphery

A new scholarly book with Bront-related content:

Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-Periphery

by  Ana Cristina Mendes

Palgrave MacMillan

ISBN: 978-3-031-20285-8

2023

This book investigates how decolonising the curriculum might work in English studies — one of the fields that bears the most robust traces of its imperial and colonial roots — from the perspective of the semi-periphery of the academic world- system. It takes the University of Lisbon as a point of departure to explore broader questions of how the field can be rethought from within, through Anglophone (post)coloniality and an institutional location in a department of English, while also considering forces from without, as the arguments in this book issue from a specific, liminal positionality outside the Anglosphere. The first half of the book examines the critical practice of and the political push for decolonising the university and the curriculum, advancing existing scholarship with this focus on semi-peripheral perspectives. The second half comprises two theoretically-informed and classroom-oriented case studies of adaptation of the literary canon, a part of model syllabi that are designed to raise awareness of and encourage an understanding of a global, pluriversal literary history.

The book includes the chapter: Adaptation Case Studies: Wuthering Heights and Home Fire. 

This chapter presents two case studies of how adaptation can contribute to decolonising the English studies curriculum. These studies, on the novels Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë
, and Home Fire (2017), by Kamila Shamsie, are selected from the syllabi “English Literature (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries)” and “English Literature (twentieth and twenty-first centuries).” The more extensive case study of decolonial pedagogical practice through adaptation is offered by Wuthering Heights—a recurrent case study in adaptation studies. Heathcliff is our entry point in the classroom into discussions of inter-imperiality, racial capitalism, and the violence inextricable from the history of Euro-Atlantic modernity and its epistemologies. We also study how imperial and inter-imperial entanglements shape the understanding of Brontë’s contemporary readers of the novel, our understandings of the text as readers situated in the semi-periphery, and how Heathcliff’s characterisation resonates with racialising operations in other empires beyond the British. To highlight the racial politics of recreating Heathcliff on screen, we examine the cultural persona of Brontë’s character through its visual reimaging in adaptations. Our focus is on Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, exploring its diverse ethnic casting, strategic use of racist language, and foregrounding of Heathcliff’s scarred, flogged Black body.