Cultural Borrowings: A Study Day on Appropriation, Reworking and Transformation

University of Nottingham
19 March 2008

> Click here for the conference webpage

 Throughout history, artists have appropriated, sampled or borrowed elements from pre-existing work for use in new cultural texts. When hip-hop artist Dangermouse mixed samples from The Beatles White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album to produce The Grey Album; or when Todd Haynes paid homage to the works of Douglas Sirk in the film Far From Heaven (2002); or when Jean Rhys reworked Jane Eyre to tell the story of the creole Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea, they were all appropriating elements from prior cultural texts for use in the creation of new works.

This one day conference, in association with the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, interrogated the nature of such cultural borrowings, looking at how we can draw together insights from across the disciplines in order to further develop academic models of appropriation, reworking and transformation.

Plenary Speakers included Professor Christine Geraghty (University of Glasgow) and Professor David Hesmondhalgh ( University of Leeds).