In the wake of British decolonisation, Hollywood has seen an influx of filmmakers from former colonised territories forging successful Hollywood careers after achieving notoriety in their homelands, including Peter Weir, Mira Nair, Gavin Hood, Shekhar Kapur, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller, Baz Luhrmann, Craig Gillespie, Jane Campion, Taika Waititi, John Woo, and Kar Wai Wong. Considering the preoccupations with the postcolonial concerns of their homelands in career-cementing films such as Australian Weir's meditation on urban aboriginals in The Last Wave (1977) and Hood's Oscar-winning account of South African gangs, Tsotsi (2005), such postcolonial filmmakers who made the transition to Hollywood find themselves in a unique position, not only to address the lingering influence of European colonialism on their nations of origin but also to negotiate transnational corporate imperialism through their participation in and often subversive use of Hollywood filmmaking. For such filmmakers, maintaining their political sensibilities during the transition from national cinema to Hollywood allowed them to extend their postcolonial critique to an international scale.

However, while such filmmakers have retained their auteur status in Hollywood, several have opted to undertake film adaptations of British texts over the past two decades, frequently choosing the Victorian literature of Britain's imperial century as their sources as a way to integrate the perspectives of their homelands into works that stereotype or ignore the presence of the colonised in a manner similar to a wide array of postcolonial texts such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1966), J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997) that, in the words of Salman Rushdie, ‘write back’ to the imperial centre. In addition, such postcolonial filmmakers rewrite and reappropriate Empire literature within an industry that represents the cultural arm of the transnational corporation central to contemporary imperialism. As a result, these adaptations deserve scrutiny as useful texts in understanding how postcolonial nations contend with the legacy of colonialism while firmly rooted in the imperial tendencies of global capitalism.

This project discusses how postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian novels for Hollywood studios contend with the legacies of British colonialism while addressing Hollywood's cultural and economic influence in the globalised world. I seek to highlight the importance of such adaptations to the fields of postcolonial, film and Victorian studies.