Tuning into Precious: The Black Women's Empowerment Adaptation and the Interruptions of the Absurd

This essay offers an intertextual analysis of Lee Daniels's Precious (2009) that places the film within a popular matrix of black feminist cultural production since the 1960s, viewing the musical and visual elements of the conversion scene through the lens of a black feminist narrative analysis that historicizes the film within the emergence of a genre that I call the black women's empowerment adaptation. I argue that understanding adaptation as a practice and a genre corresponding to the emergence of pop black feminism from the 1970s to the 2000s is necessary for understanding how the narrative logics and technologies of salvation in the film contain black women's empowerment within a compensatory frame of individual success and eschew a radical ethos of collective survival. Finally, noting Precious's emergence during an era that witnessed the explosive success of the black women's empowerment narrative in film adaptations, I discuss how Precious both cites and frustrates the conversionist logic of the black women's empowerment adaptation, offering an aesthetics of the absurd as a way out of a narrowly defined pop black feminism.