Racialized discourses

the parodic relation between black Juliet and the Predator in online comments

Abstract

Aligned with materialist Discourse Analysis, this study aims to: (i) produce a discursive reading of the notion of adaptation; and (ii) understand how the meaning of faithful adaptation guides the production of meanings about black women. To achieve these aims, we analyze public comments posted on the social media platforms Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) regarding the theatrical adaptation Romeo and Juliet, directed by Jamie Lloyd, which premiered in 2024 and starred Tom Holland, a white man, as Romeo, and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, a black woman, as Juliet. We draw on the postulates of Intersemiotic Translation (Jakobson, 2007 [1969]; McFarlane, 1996) and Adaptation Theory (Stam, 2006; Hutcheon, 2013) in order to examine how adaptation is conceptualized within these fields and, ultimately, to propose a discursive reading of this notion, understanding it as a displacement across signifying materialities whose functioning is grounded in the incompleteness that is constitutive of it (Orlandi, 2007; Pêcheux, 1977 [1975]; Indursky, 2009; Lagazzi, 2010). By arguing that the real belongs to the order of the impossible, since there are no objects independent of discourse (Pêcheux, 2008 [1973]), we reflect on how the original work produces an origin effect that returns upon adapted works, signifying them as illegitimate or unreal. We are thus interested in how raciality traverses discursivity (Modesto, 2021) in adaptations whose protagonism materializes through the performance of a black woman. The analysis of the comments reveals, as a regularity, a parodic relation established between Juliet and the character Predator, insofar as these comments postulate that the adaptation fails to capture the real of the original work because the actress is not “Shakespeare’s Juliet.” Within this parodic relation, discourse becomes racialized, as meanings are produced from a eugenic memory that reinforces the stereotyping of black women as “villains,” “evil,” and “unfeminine.” We therefore conclude that this discursivity inscribes the black subject within the domain of abnormality, circumscribing it as inferior to the white subject (Carneiro, 2023).