Revising Race through Literary Adaptation in the French Empire

When a story is adapted for a new context—a myth rewritten as a fairy tale, a novel restaged as a play, or a scientific theory recast as historical fiction—its representation of race often transforms. Race is transferred between characters, defined within different historical frameworks, accentuated, obscured, or written out entirely. In Revising Race, Kylie Sago uses literary adaptations to propose a new approach to race, treating it as a product of continual narrative repetition and change. As Sago tracks and historicizes race’s variations across adaptations from the rise of France’s empire in the late seventeenth century to its postcolonial afterlives in the twentieth century, the book examines an array of genres and media (including theater, newspapers, fashion, and archival material). Each adaptation theorizes race differently, attesting to its profound conceptual fluidity over time. Race’s narrative shifts likewise reveal the hidden workings of whiteness written into representations of blackness. Drawing on both adaptation and critical race studies, Revising Race demonstrates precisely what it means to call race a construction by analyzing how that construction unfolds as stories are retold. As these adaptations shape the ways we read race, they expose the role of reading and re-reading—that is, of adaptation—in racialization.