From Faking It to Making It: The Art of Cultural Adaptation in the Caribbean

This dissertation investigates tendencies of cultural negotiation and adaptation within a Caribbean context. Appropriately, it examines adapted texts, such as novel to film or biography to musical, and looks at sociocultural adaptive mechanisms as a means of coping with a colonial past and neocolonial present. Through my analyses of a variety of original texts and their visual adaptations, I map evolving cross-cultural perceptions of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, and cultural exploitation. While drawing theories from Adaptation Studies, I aim to promote a more inclusive, well-rounded logic of how cultural discourses in the Caribbean gain strength and are reified in culture.