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eBook details
- Title: Filming 'Princes' and Princesses: Race, Class, And the Regency in the 1990S.
- Author : Studies in the Humanities
- Release Date : January 01, 2007
- Genre: Reference,Books,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 358 KB
Description
In the process of introducing her 1997 anthology, Black British Feminism: A Reader, Heidi Safia Mirza offered what may appear to be an irrefutable proposition: "Gender is not experienced in the same way when you are positioned as working class or black, or both." (1) It would seem equally uncontroversial to assert that virtually nothing is experienced in quite the same way, depending upon one's race and class. That Mirza felt compelled to say this, however, suggests that the truth of such a statement about the importance of acknowledging difference was by no means self-evident to everyone in Britain, even as late as the mid-1990s. Indeed, as Mirza added, "To be black and British is to be unnamed in official discourse," (2) and with namelessness came continued invisibility. Three years later, Yasmin AlibhaiBrown confirmed this assessment: "we Black Britons remain barely noticed and on the periphery." (3) Black British women--that is, British women of color whose ancestry was African and/or Asian--who were also working-class often felt themselves doubly overlooked, if not deliberately excluded, as the new millennium neared. One result of this phenomenon was the mid-1990s boom in both feature films and made-for-television costume dramas based on novels by Jane Austen and set in the Regency. Media critics now identify the year 1995 as a turning point in Austen's cinematic fortunes. Melissa Sue Kort, for instance, writing recently in Ms. magazine, has spoken of "a revival of interest in her work that began in the mid-1990s," (4) while Nancy Franklin has looked back with some amusement at Austen's selection as "one of People's '25 Most Intriguing People of 1995'." This "1995 honor" by an American magazine devoted to celebrating the existence of celebrities came "in recognition of ... that year's productions," imported from Britain, of "a TV miniseries of 'Pride and Prejudice' ... and a film adaptation by Emma Thompson of 'Sense and Sensibility.'" (5) For Kort, the appeal of such representations--and of Austen's novels themselves--was their invitation to audiences to "lose" themselves "in a well-ordered, meticulously described, seemingly simple and secure past," but also their ability to provide revelations about the "complexity" of women's lives and to hold up a mirror to "the complications of our own times." (6) Yet, as Heidi Safia Mirza's remark about gender suggests, the question of which women's lives--either in the Regency or in the present--were or weren't being addressed remained largely unexamined as the Austen adaptations of the mid-1990s proliferated.