The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom / Edition 1

by Brenda Ayres

Overview

Disney’s attempt to validate multicultural diversity may appear to be a worthy, even admirable, endeavor. However, the contributors of this book argue that the Disney company’s version of multiculturalism is really the same «old groove» – a surreptitious colonizing force that manipulates the psychological, cultural, and political identities of consumers, predominantly children. Demystifying the mechanisms and ideals through which Disney manages public values and expands its empire of illusory American culture, The Emperor’s Old Groove interrogates animation role models that perpetuate insidious racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820463636
Publisher:	Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers
Publication date:	04/02/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	203
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.06(h) x 0.02(d)

About the Author

The Editor, Dr. Brenda Ayres is a full professor and member of the graduate faculty, and Assistant Honors Director at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she teaches nineteenth-century English Literature. Most of her publications are in Victorian literature, which so far total over 100 articles and 16 book publications: Augusta Jane Evans Wilson: A Critical Biography; Decolonizing Disney’s Magic Kingdom; Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers; Frances Trollope and the Novel of Social Change; and Dissenting Women in Dickens’ Novels: The Subversion of Domestic Ideology. Through Pickering and Chatto, she has been the general editor for two four-volume series, The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope and The Widow and Wedlock Novels of Frances Trollope, as well as series editors for several of the novels in those series and for Jessie Fothergill’s Kith and Kin.

Table of Contents

Contents: Susan Hines/Brenda Ayres: Introduction: (He)gemony Cricket! Why in the World Are We Still Watching Disney? – Brenda Ayres: The Wonderful World of Disney: The World That Made the Man and the Man That Made the World – Mark Axelrod: Beauties and Their Beasts & Other Motherless Tales from the Wonderful World of Walt Disney – Brenda Ayres: The Poisonous Apple in Snow White: Disney’s Kingdom of Gender – Kellie Bean: Stripping Beauty: Disney’s «Feminist» Seduction – Christiane Staninger: Disney’s Magic Carpet Ride: Aladdin and Women in Islam – Kathleen E. B. Manley: Disney, The Beast, and Woman As Civilizing Force – Brian E. Szumsky: «All That Is Solid Melts into the Air»: «The Winds of Change» and Other Analogues of Colonialism in Disney’s Mary Poppins – Christopher Wise: Notes from the Aladdin Industry: Or, Middle Eastern Folklore in the Era of Multinational Capitalism – Stephen M. Buhler: Shakespeare and Company: The Lion King and the Disneyfication of Hamlet – Richard Finkelstein: Disney’s Tempest: Colonizing Desire in The Little Mermaid – Sheng-mei Ma: Mulan Disney, It’s Like, Re-Orients: Consuming China and Animating Teen Dreams – Pushpa Naidu Parekh: Pocahontas: The Disney Imaginary – Dianne Sachko Macleod: The Politics of Vision: Disney, Aladdin, and the Gulf War.