Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in Canada’s postcolonial popular culture

Abstract

This essay analyzes the cultural functions of Frankenstein as a figure of globalization in postcolonial popular culture. Focusing on the case of Canadian film production, I begin by contextualizing Canadian film as a postcolonial site of globalized popular culture, characterized by ‘technological nationalism’. In this context, I consider three Canadian films that adapt Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to represent globalization. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983) borrows from Frankenstein and Marshall McLuhan to critique new media in the ‘global village’; Robert Lepage’s Possible Worlds (2000) quotes from the Universal Frankenstein film; and Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot’s The Corporation (2003) uses Frankenstein as a recurring analogy for the modern corporation. This essay signals a starting point for a more interculturally and transnationally comparative investigation of how Frankenstein adaptations provide a powerful repertoire of representational devices for a postcolonial theory of globalization.