2025/03/20 by Michelle Anya Anjirbag · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Asian Culture and Media Studies #Media, Gender, and Advertising #Military history and social perspectives
paper · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197633496.013.5
openalex publication_date 2025/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Disney’s construction of the animated Agrabah for Aladdin in the early 1990s was heavily criticized for its poor politics of representation despite the acclaim the film eventually received, specifically for its orientalizing gaze and the deployment of dehumanizing stereotypes that flatten and efface a vast geopolitical region with a complex, vibrant, multicultural history. The 2019 remediation does not do any better at deconstructing this orientalizing gaze, despite the lengths gone to by Disney to announce this as a more authentic, more culturally accurate remake of the animated film. This chapter uses the animated film and its remediation to address the Disney corporation’s habitual deployment of commodity racism and the implicit whiteness at the corporation’s core, as seen through habits of othering various non-European descendent cultures and patterns of both effacement and erasure.