Transcreating Carceral Subjugation, Ethnic Erasure and the Limits of Human Subjectivity on Screen: An Enquiry into the Prison Narratives of Schindler's List and Orange Is The New Black

Amid different forms of adaptation, film adaptation occupies a significant place in contemporary creative industries. The process of transferring a literary work onto the big screen can be viewed in translational terms and adaptation can be regarded as a creative process like translation. In translation Studies, adaptation is often viewed as a set of translative interventions which gives birth to a text that is not generally accepted as a translation but still represents a source text to some extent. So, adaptation is posited with the techniques of translation which ultimately aims at relevance rather than accuracy. In that sense, adaptation can be viewed as a creative translation where the message of the source text gets filtered through the creative vista of the adapter. As a translational process, adaptation depends on the sociocultural context in which it takes place and stimulates new readings of the source text. Thereby, it reverberates with the notions of rewriting, reinterpretation and recontextualization. Therefore, adaptation operates by Lefevere’s idea of refraction where Lefevere points out that the adaptation of a work of literature works to influence how the audience reads the work. Lefevere points out that translation is a rewriting of a source text and it carries a work of literature over from one system into another. This paper attempts to focus on ethnic erasure, female captivity and female carceral subjugation, respectively in the two trans-creative texts- Schindler’s List and Orange is the New Black. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is one of the most popular epic drama movies of World War II ever produced. The screenplay of this movie is adapted from the novel Schindler’s Ark written by Thomas Keneally. Schindler’s List has an uncommon story, it is a historical movie about historical events. The horror of the ethnic cleansing which is reflected in Schindler’s List is one of the appealing aspects that is interesting to be studied. In this proposed study, I would also like to talk about the female victims during the period of Holocaust. Next, Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), a comedic drama with seven seasons, is one of the most-watched original series on Netflix. Based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, Orange is the New Black: My Years in a Women’s Prison, the show follows the main character Piper Chapman as she serves time in Litchfield Penitentiary, a women’s federal prison. OITNB highlights how women in prison experience the foundations of the criminal justice system: policing, arrest, prosecution and sentencing that disproportionately target poor communities and communities of colour. Prison for most of us is an unknown experience and anything we know is mainly through representations in media. This show sheds light on the lives of the female jailbirds and their experiences in prison. So, this paper will try to delineate the lives of the women who are victims of ethnic erasure and also the female inmates who are in prison experiencing the pangs of incarceration.