A review by colin_cox
Pride by Ibi Zoboi
4.0
Ibi Zoboi's Pride is a contemporary adaptation of Jane Austen's canonical text, Pride and Prejudice. As Linda Hutcheon might suggest, Zoboi "openly announces this relationship" between texts on several occasions. For example, Pride begins with language that certainly borrows from Austen, but what matters more is how it departs from Austen's text by emphasizing the distinct racial dynamics that define the narrative and dramatic tension in Pride. Zoboi writes, "It's a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood, where it's a little bit broken and a little bit forgotten, the first thing they want to do is clean it up" (1). Pride and Pride and Prejudice are about change, but by transforming early 19th-century class sensibilities into contemporary anxieties about race and gentrification, Zoboi shows how dynamic and interconnected seemingly disparate texts are. Said another way, the past, like the texts we adapt, haunt us. Hutcheon characterizes this dynamic by suggesting that "Although adaptations are also aesthetic objects in their own right, it is only as inherently double or multi-laminated works that they can be theorized as adaptations" (6). This "doubling" implies the layering effect at play in any adaptation. Austen's Pride and Prejudice is about a young, intelligent white woman who confronts the ways in which her society disproportionately favor individuals of a particular class in possession of a particular amount of money. Pride retains the socio-economics of Pride and Prejudice, but it adds race. This is a critical distinction, and not under any circumstances new, but the joy of Pride appears in those moments when it appropriates a canonical text that is overwhelmingly white and makes it black. This is a process that Hutcheon might describe as "Local particulars become transplanted to new ground" (150). For Pride, this "new ground" is both literal and figurative; white becomes black, the English countryside becomes a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn.
Too often, when people think about adaptation, they assume the adaptation inferior even subordinate because it willingly acknowledges its relationship in the marketplace of texts and ideas. At times, this is a fair critique, but this is not the case with Ibi Zoboi's Pride. Unlike some adaptations that seem to collapse under the weight of the adapted text in question, Pride transcends it.
Too often, when people think about adaptation, they assume the adaptation inferior even subordinate because it willingly acknowledges its relationship in the marketplace of texts and ideas. At times, this is a fair critique, but this is not the case with Ibi Zoboi's Pride. Unlike some adaptations that seem to collapse under the weight of the adapted text in question, Pride transcends it.