Robert Stam

A companion to literature and film

List of Illustrations. Notes on Contributors. Preface. Acknowledgments. 1. Novels, Films, and the Word/Image Wars: Kamilla Elliott (University of California at Berkeley). 2. Sacred Word, Profane Image: Theologies Of Adaptation: Ella Shohat (New York University). 3. Gospel Truth? From Cecil B. DeMille to Nicholas Ray: Pamela Grace (New York University). 4. Transecriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality: Andre Gaudreault (University of Montreal) and Philippe Marion. 5. The Look: From Film to Novel: An Essay in Comparative Narratology: Francois Jost (Sorbonne). 6. Adaptation and Mis--adaptations: Film, Literature, and Social Discourses: Francesco Casetti (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart). 7. The Invisible Novelty: Film Adaptations in the 1910s: Yuri Tsivian (University of Chicago). 8. Italy and America: Pinocchioa s First Cinematic Trip: Raffaele De Berti (University of Milan). 9. The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantomas: Tom Gunning (University of Chicago). 10. Cosmopolitan Projections: World Literature on Chinese Screens: Zhang Zhen (New York University). 11. The Rhetoric of Interruption: Allen Weiss (New York University). 12. Visualizing The Voice: Joyce, Cinema And The Politics Of Vision: Luke Gibbons (University of Notre Dame). 13. Adapting Cinema to History: a Revolution in the Making: Dudley Andrew (Yale University). 14. Photographic Verismo, Cinematic Adaptation, and the Staging of a Neorealist Landscape: Noa Steimatsky (Yale University). 15. The Devila s Parody: Horace McCoya s Appropriation and Refiguration of Two Hollywood Musicals: Charles Musser (Yale University). 16. The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir: R. Barton Palmer (Clemson University). 17. Adapting Farewell, My Lovely: William Luhr (Columbia University). 18. Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock: Richard Allen (New York University). 19. Running Time: The Chronotope of The Loneliness of the Long--Distance Runner: Peter Hitchcock (Baruch College, CUNY). 20. From Libertinage to Eric Rohmer: Transcending a Adaptationa : Maria Tortajada (University of Lausanne). 21. The Moment of Portraiture: Scorsese Reads Wharton: Brigitte Peucker (Yale University). 22. The Talented Post--structuralist: Hetero--masculinity, Gay Artifice, and Class Passing: Chris Straayer (New York University). 23. From Bram Stokera s Dracula to Bram Stokera s Dracula: Margaret Montalbano (New York University). 24. The Bible as Cultural Object[s] in Cinema: Gavriel Moses (University of California at Berkeley). 25. Alla s Wells that Ends Wells: Apocalypse and Empire in The War of the Worlds: Julian Cornell (New York University). Index

Whence and Whither Postcolonial Theory

The Stam/Shohat essay addresses the “whence” and the “whither” of postcolonial critique. In their dialogue with the Young and Chakravarty essays, they argue for a decentered multidirectional narrative for the circulation of ideas. Tracing the issues raised by postcolonial critique back to “the various 1492s”—the Reconquista, the Inquisition, the Edicts of Expulsion, and the Conquista of the “new” world—they argue that postcolonial theory has multiple beginnings, locations, and trajectories. The “encounter” between Europe and the indigene provoked a salutary epistemological crisis in Europe. “indigeneity,” they argue, troubles some of the basic axioms of postcolonial theory, while also opening up new horizons of the politically possible. By posing probing questions about culture, property, power, energy, wealth, and equality, indigenous people and their non-indigenous interlocutors have challenged the assumptions of modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism.

Imperialism and the Fantasies of Democracy

This essay is taken from a book that criticizes the abuse of the concept of patriotism by the American right wing. At the same time it engages polemically with anti-Americans, whether rightists or leftists. Present-day tensions, the essay argues, must be seen against the backdrop of the much longer history of not only colonialism and imperialism but various national mythologies. At times, we argue, “anti-Americanism” is a completely rational response to specific offenses by the U.S. government or by U.S.–led transnational corporations; yet at other times legitimate critique becomes mingled with blind obsessions, paranoid projections, and even defensive guilt. Examining abuses of the concept of patriotism, the work focuses on various national mythologies and exceptionalisms, and on myriad forms of patriotism, in terms of the following questions: What are the long-term historical sources and current manifestations of love and hate, pride and anger, in patriotic nationalism? How did patriotism in the United States become so thoroughly militarized? How do rival conceptions of patriotism interact and interpenetrate across national boundaries? How did we arrive at this point of crisis? How have countries such as Brazil, France, and the United States tended to imagine one another, and for what historical reasons, and what has changed in the present? What is the role of narcissism both in American superpatriotism and in anti-Americanism?

Eurocentrism, afrocentrism, polycentrism: Theories of third cinema

Roy Armes. Third World Filmmaking and the West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds. Questions of Third Cinema London: BFI, 1989.

FRENCH INTELLECTUALS AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

This essay outlines the ‘structuring absence’ of postcolonial theory in dominant French discourse until quite recently, despite Frances position as a multiracial post-colonial society and despite the central role of French and francophone anticolonial thinkers in postcolonial and critical race thought. The essay outlines the absence of postcolonial thought, cultural studies, and critical race studies in French intellectual production through the 1990s, as well as the ironies of this absence, and also points to recent French writing that works to account for this absence and highlight the continuities between Frances colonial past and postcolonial present. The late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, we argue, saw a burgeoning of scholarship on the part of French intellectuals who were committed to postcolonial critique. Especially after the 2005 rebellions in France, there emerged a growing scholarship – in the form of conferences, special issues of journals, co-edited volumes, collected works, anthologies and individual books – which was met with a series of critiques denying the connection between colonialism and the contemporary moment but which nonetheless generated a crucial and necessary intervention in French public life.

The Red Atlantic: Travelling Debates

By applying the concept of the “Red Atlantic,” partially inspired by that of “the Black Atlantic,” the chapter shows how the mobility and interchange between Europeans and the indigenous populations of the Americas is a quintessential example of “traveling theory.” It discusses diverse cultural and historical materials telling of the transnational flow of ideas around the figure of the Indian and the multifaceted encounters among various linguistic/cultural zones. It is suggested that the dialogue between European and indigenous thought has become part of such varied progressive causes as Jacobin and socialist revolutions, confederation and the separation of powers, class, gender and sexual equality, communal property, ecology, jouissance, anti-productivism, and alter-globalization.

Interview with Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: "Brazil Is Not Travelling Enough": On Postcolonial Theory and Analogous Counter-Currents

It was our pleasure to interview Professors Ella Shohat and Robert Stam from New York University during their visit to the Netherlands to join two events hosted by the Postcolonial Init iative and the Centre for the Humanities of Utrecht University. In this interview they touch on points of crit ical importance to reflect on the themes developed throughout the current issue of P: Portuguese Cultural Studies .