Transnational authorship, heterotopia and poetic American West: the practical strategies in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland (2020)

This paper explores how Chloé Zhao employs adaptation strategies to construct her transnational identity in her film Nomad land (2020). Through two significant adaptations, Zhao replaces the real protagonist, Linda May, in the original with the fictional middle-aged white woman, Fern. This intervention allows Zhao to project her authorship shaped by mobility, outsiderhood, and personal cinematic aesthetics into an easily understood role from an American left-wing liberal perspective. Through Fern’s persistent loneliness and repeated farewells, Zhao maintains low political visibility, transforming the instability of American society into a personalized, “safe” narrative space. Meanwhile, the film’s poetic reconstruction of the vans and the American West transforms spaces shaped by colonial history, labor exploitation and the instability of late capitalism, into heterotopias, facilitating personal healing and identity. Through these strategies, Zhao reconstructs these spaces as an aesthetic sanctuary where she can reconcile her outsider identity. This aestheticization constitutes a creative mode of low political visibility, allowing Zhao to participate in American mainstream film industry without directly confronting ideological tensions. Together, these adaptive strategies collectively reveal how Zhao uses fiction and landscape to negotiate transnational identity through a personalized and politically cautious cinematic languages.