Having taken an extended leave of blogging absence I'm coming back to finish what I started - by blogging a whole lot in one day...
The next few posts will essentially summarise what I've learnt this semester in looking at Disney and its propensity to manipulate pretty much everything. If you have a look at that kid who lives down the hall's blog, you'll realise he also is a lazy college student and has backloaded everything. We're starting a club...
This first post of the day will look at Disney's Aladdin and the problems within it, a discussion guided by Eric Addison's piece 'Saving Other Women from Other Men'.
What really jumped put at me from this reading was the ethnic coding in Aladdin which, as a child, went right over my head. Never would I have considered Aladdin to be the 'diamond in the rough' in a cultural sense, but it is very obvious he is. Addison comments that he is a "thinly disguised American entrepreneur", spouting American ideals and values in the stereotypically racist 'Middle Eastern' setting of Agrabah. This clash of ideals between Aladdin and his contextual environment is most manifest in the responsibility he has in "freeing" Jasmine from the confinement of her gender role in 'Eastern' society. This conflict is, perhaps haphazardly, linked back to the contemporary cultural context of Aladdin's creation in 1994, only a year after the events of the Gulf War, which ended in '93. Thus Aladdin comes to represent the American protagonist, combatting the enslavement of the Middle Eastern people by the tyrannical traditions of the area.
I've also written a pretty dank essay of my own on the topic, extending Addison's analysis to draw the conclusion that Disney has appropriated a traditional eastern tale (the basis for Disney's version comes form One Thousand and One Nights, but the original 'original' is actually a Chinese folk tale) to instill western values under the guise of cultural sensitivity. Nothing of the like is happening, instead, I use long words like 'perpetuating crusader tradition' and cool analogies such as one dealing with the croissant to suggest that Aladdin is part of the 'tenth crusade', a conflict between east and west that has been waged since the early 20th century and is now fought with the media and Predator Missiles rather than swords and shields. It's a pretty sick essay...
You might have guessed it was coming...
(this is not my picture)
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