Tracing Trans/National/Textual Limits in Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake: China Girl

Through a host of characters, Jane Campion’s BBC UKTV series Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) draws on and reflects a diverse adaptation network, focused on transnational communities such as nations and suburbs and those who threaten their cohesion. From historical Australian serial fiction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel Devils, revolutionary manifestos and oral histories, Campion appropriates a variety of texts to analyse glocal social embodiment, questioning the white supremacy of Australia’s screen culture, using what Anne Anlin Cheng has termed “Ornamentalism.” As nations converge in the series, Worthy considers the intermedial practices of television culture, including international streaming on OTT platforms, to question the slippery nature of influence and transnationalism, and how Campion interprets them in a modern Australian context. This chapter is forward-looking in its interdisciplinary approach—analysing the limits around the texts deemed appropriate for literary studies as a way of showing television’s capacity to denaturalise certain divisions in society and culture, while also considering the intermedial limitations of texts, and of the media that convey them.