Tuning into <em>Precious</em>: The Black Women's Empowerment Adaptation and the Interruptions of the Absurd

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Adapt and Resist: Infrapolitics in Steve McQueen’s 12YearsaSlave

“…Further, by looking at these elements through an infrapolitical lens and probing how this adaptation draws upon infrapolitics, scholars, resistance theories, and black studies provide better nomenclatures to describe the sometime enigmatic task of identifying black resistance. Adaptations, Erica Edwards argues, provide opportunities “for narratives to find wider and more diverse audiences” (75), audiences that may differ significantly from original works, in this case Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave . To add, an infrapolitical lens reexamines 12 Years a Slave as one that invokes concepts that not only expand the genre of the slave narrative but invariably revise history and disrupt hegemonic and heteropatriarchal notions of the plantocracy and the success of Epps’s plantation project.…”