Appropriation or Dialogue—and Why It Matters: The Poetics and Politics of Transcultural Adaptation

Adaptation studies has long occupied an uneasy position between literary, film, and media studies. Its trajectory has been far from smooth, moving from early fidelity criticism to later intertextual studies primarily informed by narratological insights. While earlier scholarship focused on the semiotic or formal dimensions of adaptation, the field is now experiencing a cultural turn, with adaptation increasingly situated within media culture and examined for its cultural implications. Whereas an earlier emphasis on transmedia adaptation compelled attention to the semiotic features of different media, foregrounding topics such as media affordances, the recent cultural turn urges us to consider adaptation’s broader cultural ramifications—not merely as functions of media culture, but as part of wider processes of cultural negotiation and transformation. Transcultural adaptation, an underexplored realm within adaptation studies, offers a unique vantage point from which to understand such negotiation and transformation.

To illustrate the complexity of the process, this talk approaches transcultural adaptation as a politically charged phenomenon with significant narrative consequences. The cultural negotiations involved, which are never neutral, may take the form of borrowing, appropriation, hybridization, indigenization, among others, each producing distinct narrative effects. To demonstrate how these strategies operate in practice, I examine Disney’s adaptations of The Ballad of Mulan—the 1998 animated feature and the more recent live-action film—highlighting the ways in which different cultural strategies leave discernible narrative traces.