Scott Schaffer

Programme in Social and Political Thought
York University
sschaffe@yorku.ca

 

Recently, the Walt Disney Company abandoned its plans to develop an American history theme park near Manassas, Virginia, the site of a major battle during the American Civil War. Part of the reason for this decision, according to the company, was that the citizens of Manassas and surrounding areas had fought the development of the theme park, claiming that the “true” history of not only the Civil War, but also of all of America, would not be told there. At the same time, The Globe and Mail reviewed Disney’s new live-action film, Squanto, stating that it was historically inaccurate; however, as the Globe notes, “history is written by the winners, and you can’t get much more victorious than Daddy Disney” (5 November 1994, p. C14). It is surprising that these are some of the first public, i.e. non-academic, protests against Disney’s perversion of local histories in the creation of its products, as this process is the entire basis of the Disney Company’s corporate production. That is, the Walt Disney Company co-opts local histories, without their corresponding local social and political geographies, reconstitutes them as the Company’s own, and sells them to Disney’s customers as markers of American political, cultural, and imperial attitudes. This co-optation and perversion of local histories in the creation of the Disney Company’s products not only removes and rewrites these histories from their specific contexts, but also reduces the corresponding social geographies to terrains that can be colonized and brought within the “Small World” of the Disney theme park, and can then be sold over and over again to new generations of children, thereby perpetuating the Disney Company’s transmission to new generations of the stereotypes created to justify American imperial power.

 

The first section of this paper will explore how the animated films of the Walt Disney Company (WDC) treat local stories and histories as fodder for “‘the rapacious strip-miner’ in the goldmine of legend and myth,'” (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18) and attempt to sell those who have their stories taken a perception that they are supposed to have of themselves — that of the cultural Other of America. To do this, I argue that WDC appropriates local stories, reinscribes them in the discourse of American imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, and sells the stories to all as portrayals of American cultural and political Others, revising old stereotypes in the current terms of American imperial expansion. I then argue, in the second section, that this reinscription process deprives the stories of their particular local geographies, and allows them to therefore be coopted and placed in ahistorical, ageographical ways in the creation of the Disney theme parks. This, in effect, allows WDC to set up representations of the world in the way that Disney would have wanted to see it — as an allegorical representation of the power of the United States. Hence, the guiding metaphor for the Disney theme parks is the ride, “It’s a Small World,” where all the “children” of the world are brought together in one place to sing the annoying song of cultural imperialism, all brought to you by Bank of America. In the third section of this paper, I turn to the way in which this cultural hegemony produced by the animated films and the theme parks maintains and perpetuates itself through marketing strategies designed to make these products seem timeless, and therefore the story they tell of American greatness seem to last for all time. In all, I would argue that the United States government no longer has the monopoly on the touting of America’s conquest of the world; Mickey Mouse and the other Disney characters do it for them, making imperialism that much cuter.

 

American “Distory” Through Film: Creating Disney’s World Order

 

Making the conceptual stretch from examining Disney’s animated features to talking about the inscription of American cultural imperialist discourse seems to be nothing more than a senseless attack on one of America’s — and the world’s — most loved cultural icons. However, exploring those “myths” — and here I use myth in the sense of cultural stories that provide a structure by which society and narratives for social action can be constructed (Lincoln 1989:25) — is important, and especially for the Walt Disney Company’s (WDC) myths, because WDC is ideologically bound up with the American governmental apparatus, and has been since before World War Two. Officially, WDC became involved with the American government as a matter of finances, due to the near bankruptcy of WDC, thanks to Walt’s mishandling of funds and the war in Europe, which cut off quite a large market (and a popular one — King George apparently refused to go to a film unless a Mickey Mouse short was being shown, and Disney himself was received by Benito Mussolini during a visit to Italy in 1937). The Disney studios in Burbank, California, became “the most extensive ‘war plant’ in Hollywood, housing mountains of munitions, quartering antiaircraft troops, providing overflow office space for Lockheed personnel. By 1943, fully 94% of the footage produced at the studios was war-related. Disney had become a government contractor on a massive scale” (Burton 1992:33). In addition, WDC was hired by Nelson Rockefeller, who was then (1940) director of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, to produce a series of documentaries and motion pictures about the Latin and South American regions, providing a way for the United States to “ease any remaining tensions with South American governments in order to maintain hemispheric unity as a bulwark against foreign invasion,” as well as to “show the truth about the American Way” to those who lived below the Rio Grande (Burton 1992:25). As well, WDC prodded the government of the state of Florida to allow it to set up two cities that encapsulate the Walt Disney World theme park so that it would have the ability to manage its own governmental affairs as well as have more clout with the Florida government when trying to get permits, development funding, and the like. Ideologically, WDC portrayed itself as being the bearer of true American values to the world; as one piece of Disney publicity circa the opening of Disneyland (1955) put it,

 

Disneyland will be based upon and dedicated to the ideals, the dreams, and the hard facts that have created America. And it will be uniquely equipped to dramatize these dreams and facts and send them forth as a source of courage and inspiration to all the world.

 

Disneyland will be something of a fair, an exhibition, a playground, a community center, a museum of living facts, and a showplace of beauty and magic. It will be filled with the accomplishments, the joys, the hopes of the world we live in. And it will remind us and show us how to make those wonders part of our lives (in Sorkin 1992:206). And, metaphorically, WDC sees itself as interchangeable — or at least exchangeable — with the US government; its Disney Dollars, available from the theme parks, are exchangeable currency with the US dollar at a one-to-one ratio.

 

As a way of looking at the films and theme parks of the Disney Company as agents of legitimation for American imperialism, I would like to start with a simple premise: that the media works to affect and effect what Fromm called the “social character” of a society. In Fromm’s conception, the social character is formed by the educational and cultural apparatuses of a society. There is also another level of the character of society, the social unconscious, which Fromm says functions as a “socially conditioned filter,” through which “experience cannot enter awareness unless it can penetrate this filter” (Fromm 1994: 74). I would argue that within American society, the social character, formed as it is through the surface-level political discourses of liberty, equality, and freedom, is counteracted in some sense by the need on the part of the social unconscious for an Other — not in the Levinasian sense of a Face to Face encounter, but rather as in the sense that Durkheim refers to the deviant — as the defining moment of membership. This is not uncommon or unnoted: Hegel claims that the recognition of the self by another is the defining moment of humanity (The Phenomenology of Mind), and I would, following Bauman’s discussion of exclusionary strategies of social group membership (1994:237), extend this into the realm of the larger social order as well. In other words, at the level of the social unconscious, the Self (namely, the American society) can only be defined in terms of denoting the boundary between itself and Others that it interacts with in the world system at large.

 

Disney plays a part in this boundary denotation, in that it allows for the perpetuation of cultural stereotypes that portray, albeit in a “cute” way, the Otherness of the areas of the world that the United States has come to dominate, be they politically, culturally, or economically. It does this by utilizing stories from the past — from traditions, generally those of other countries — in such a way as to reinforce the values and cultural practices of America. Disney’s intention as a corporation is to portray life in the places that it depicts in its products in the way in which America either was like or should have been like, regardless of the historical specificity of the situation it attempts to portray. My analysis here focuses upon this use of tradition as a mechanism for social boundary maintenance, and I analyze the products of the Disney company in such a way so as to highlight the imputation of these boundary maintenance mechanisms into the original stories that are depicted.¹ As Bauman notes, “Rejection of strangers may shy away from expressing itself in racial terms, but it cannot afford admitting being arbitrary lest it should abandon all hope of success; it verbalizes itself therefore in terms of . . . the self-defence of a form of life bequeathed by tradition” (Bauman 1994: 235). While the Disney films do not explicitly argue for neo-tribalism in their content, I would argue that their past history as propagandists for the United States during World War Two, as well as the messages of their films and theme parks, combined with their marketing strategy regarding the recycling of films and the recontextualization of their contstructed geographies in the theme parks, provide sufficient reason to claim that their function vis-à-vis the social character is to construct a boundary between America/”Americans” and the rest of the world and its citizenry, even within the United States.

 

One might argue that this analysis is one-sided, that there may be a critical distance between the constructed messages behind the Disney parks and films and the reception of them by the “guests” of the parks or the viewers of the film. While I do not dispute the possible existence of this critical distance (if I did, this paper would be impossible, for example), I would argue that these subtle messages have the potential to work their way into the social character of the United States. The Disney products function as cultural legitimations, which serve to make normal conceptions of the differences in access to power (Fjellman 1992:30). Following Fanon, I would argue that the products of the Walt Disney Company provide American society with a collective catharsis, a way of having all of the internal contradictions and aggression, both within its members and within the social order, externalized and played out before and away from them (Fanon 1967:145). Problematically, though, Disney’s catharsis marks out its aggressions from the perspective of the American hegemon. That is, its portrayals of the stories that it takes from the world rewrite them from the point of view of what Fanon would call the “neurosis of the colonizer”; in other words, I would argue that the master/slave dialectic that Fanon observes in colonial Africa in regard to the relationship between colonizer and colonized reappears, though in a much cuter guise, in Disneyland and in terms more appropriate for American society. In doing so, the Disney Company’s products serve to construct a “white” (or, in other terms, an American imperialistic) pathway for its consumers from which to perceive the world and themselves. As Itwaru notes, in regards to the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto,

 

It is assumed in this premise that our thinking must necessarily be realized within the Occupier's frame of references, that these perspectives should govern the ways we reflect on our condition. And in so doing to not pay heed to the fundamental differences in the circumstances in which we are deemed subordinate, our realities subservient to the principals as well as the principles of the super-ordinating imperial order. (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994:23)

 

Put another way, cultural products naturalize the political and economic conditions within which they were created, and in the construction of cultural messages or legitimations presume a point of view that does not necessarily coincide with the place of the consumer and in fact, as Itwaru puts it, makes the consumer “faceless” and placed under the control, at least at the level of the political unconscious, of the creator of the cultural product. In doing so, imperialist discourse can ingrain themselves not at the level of normalcy, but at the level of the political unconscious (Itwaru and Ksonzek 1994: 59, 94), making critical reflection upon the messages embedded in cultural commodities even more difficult.

 

Having made clear the impetus for the critical examination of Disney animated features and theme parks for their depiction of American cultural and political imperialism, I turn now first to the films themselves.

 

the Three Caballeros: The Monroe Doctrine’s Piñata

 

The Three Caballeros, produced in 1945, was the direct result of a request by the American government to produce films that would represent the goodwill of America towards the Latin American region, as well as depict the American Way to them. Combined with an extensive comic book production, The Three Caballeros and its two predecessors, South of the Border with Disney and Saludos Amigos, were intended to ensure the solidarity of the Western Hemisphere against the possibility of enemy attack during World War Two by portraying Americans not as colonizers (as they had been since the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century), but rather as compañeros, joined in the enterprise of enjoying life.

 

The Three Caballeros is a three-part cartoon, presented as a birthday “package” that arrives for Donald Duck. This package is designed to represent all of the best elements of Latin American culture and geography, and does so in the form of the “travel book” — the kind of book that is designed to give the entire experience of “being there” surrogately without ever having to leave one’s home. It tells three of these “travel stories”: one of Pablo Penguin, who decides that the cold of the South Pole is no longer tolerable, and decides to move north to warmer climes; another of Joe Cariota, a Brasilian parrot, who takes Donald to Baía, Brazil; and the last of Panchito, a Mexican parrot who escorts Donald and Joe Cariota to the resort cities of Mexico. In all of these stories, the underlying theme is domination: Pablo ends up enlisting a turtle in his service while lounging on the sands of a Pacific island; Donald attempts to dominate the women of South America, but is foiled by the “potency” of the local men²; and the portrayal of these scenes in the form of “travel books” dominates the locales in the sense of showing only what is commodifiable about the locations (i.e. the fiesta aspect of life in these areas).

 

While originally contracted for and touted as a true representation of what Latin America and Latin Americans were “all about,” The Three Caballeros ends up becoming what I see as the standard pattern of Disney animated features³ — a legitimation, or the “Distorifying” (taking off from Fjellman’s concept of Distory, or Disney’s history), of the political, economic, and cultural hegemony of the United States. The intention of the film was to show the American movie-going public what life was like in Latin America, much in the same way that Disney’s nature films showed what “wildlife” was like. As well, as Burton points out, it was to convey the idea of the American Way to Latin Americans, and to show that the US was not solely out to colonize their neighbours to the south. However, this is precisely what happens in The Three Caballeros: the different mediums by which Donald Duck (and us, the viewers) is shown the way of life in Latin and South America (a film, two books, and a piñata) are all easily commodifiable forms in which the story can be consumed and the life can be colonized in the same sense that Mitchell outlines; I will return to this later. The film, which tells the story of Pablo Penguin moving north from the South Pole, introduces Donald to the allure of the exotic “other” of the islands off of the Pacific coast of Latin America, and sparks Donald’s desire to “live the life” of Latin Americans. The story then moves to Joe Cariota’s transportation of Donald to Baía, where Donald meets the stereotypical Brasilians: partying men and women, dancing and enjoying life, seemingly without worry. After partaking of the life of Brazil, Donald and Joe are then joined by Panchito, who transports them to old Mexico, where Donald partakes of the life of Christmas and fiesta, wanders with hombres who are barefooted, wear serapes and sleep under their sombreros; and falls in love with conquistadoras who appear from cactus fields. In the cases of both Baía and Mexico, Donald’s participation in the festivities is only possible when the local music and dance begins to sound like American traditional (i.e. Broadway musical genre or Dixieland music); that is, Donald the American’s participation is only possible when there are American elements dominating the cultural practice. For example, Donald can only join in the fiesta when the mariachi band begins playing Dixieland-style jazz. Hence, like a McDonald’s restaurant in Beijing, The Three Caballeros privileges the flattening-out of local cultures and their Americanization, making it possible for something this “foreign” in these strange places to be consumed.

 

The Jungle Book: The Bare Necessities, Made in India

 

The Jungle Book, released in 1967, is a most problematic film in terms of deciphering its unique colonial content, as separate from that of the story upon which it was based. Unlike Pinocchio, which was a local traditional story (whose perversion by Disney was litigated against by Collodi’s grandson; Forgacs 1992:371-72) and The Three Caballeros (an original Disney story), The Jungle Book originally comes out of a highly imperialistic context. Kipling wrote the original book during the height of the British rule of India, and many have commented on the colonizing aspects of this novel.⁴ I would argue that the use of this story by Disney allowed for its translation from one imperialistic context — the British rule of India — to another, the American war against Viet Nam.

 

The Jungle Book was released in 1967, well into the so-called postcolonial era; however, some of its earlier, more British colonial tinges remain, most often in the accents of the characters: the elephant Colonel Hathi, recipient of the Victoria Cross “for service in the Maharajah’s Third Pachyderm Brigade”; Bagheera as Mowgli’s “nanny”; Shere Khan, with the thickest British accent of all of the characters, as the “ruler of the jungle” (referred to as “Your Highness”); and the vultures, who seem eerily like the Beatles. The film, though, functions as an allegory of the transition from British to American imperialist power; Baloo, sounding and acting strangely like The Duke, John Wayne, ultimately wins the battle to the death with Shere Khan. It is unseemly that this “shiftless jungle bum,” in the words of Bagheera, could become the ruler of the jungle; however, as the Americans have unfortunately shown since World War Two, one does not need to have the propriety of the British in order to rule the world, and Baloo’s character seems to embody this rather well.

 

A second inscription of American imperialism would seem to be the treatment of Mowgli, the human boy who is raised in “the wild” by Bagheera and Baloo (the two imperialistic parents, of British and American voices/origins). First, Mowgli is never identified particularly as “Indian,” as he was in the original Jungle Book stories; instead, only his dark skin marks him off as “foreign,” and without any other identifying physical features, he becomes a generalized Other for Americans, one who could live anywhere in “the jungle.” Mowgli is also referred to variously as “man-cub” or “boy,” and in fact these become interchangeable throughout the film. The portrayal of this dark-skinned person (who, in the newly-released live-action version of The Jungle Book, grows from age five to an adult while in the jungle) as “boy” brings up issues of diminutiveness, which are also prevalent in imperialistic discourse:

 

A boy is a male child below the age of puberty. But the term "boy" was also used to designate a servant or slave (especially in colonial or post-colonial Africa, and India, and parts of China, as well as in southern parts of the United States); in other words, "boy" functions as a term of domination, a term to designate an inferior, to create a distinction between or among men -- of any age (Garber 1992:89).

 

Conflating these two markers of inferiority, Mowgli becomes a universal Other to imperialists (of either British or American ilk), much in the same way, as I will describe later, that Adventureland in the Disney theme parks becomes the land of the Others who are “anywhere outside North America and Western Europe.” So, it would seem that The Jungle Book becomes a marker of the expansion of American political imperialism into Southeast Asia, especially with the advent of the Viet Nam war. At the time of the film’s release, the American army was doing “relatively well” (at least in military terms) with the war, and I would argue that this film reflects the projection of America’s pride in the “body counts” onto “the jungles” of the region.

 

A footnote: Disney recently released a live-action version of The Jungle Book, starring Jason Scott Lee, an actor of Chinese descent. This story stays more closely with the original Kipling stories, and attempts to show a “kinder, gentler” version of the story told in the earlier animated version. Instead, the film is changed so that Mowgli is an adult — and can be taught (see the discussion of Aladdin below) — and triumphs not over the colonizing forces, but only those who wish to take ancient treasures from secret cities. Here, the portrayal of the colonial British forces runs something more along the lines of benevolent patriarchs who provide education and industry for the local natives. Still, the conflation of ethnicities and locales — the actor who plays Mowgli is Chinese, and the film was shot mostly in South Carolina — sends a relatively clear message that the accurate representations of local stories and histories are fluff when compared with the profit margin.

 

Aladdin: A Whole New (Old) World

 

In Aladdin, Disney’s 1992 release, we find another expansion of American cultural and political imperialism, this time into the Middle East. Contemporaneous with the Persian Gulf conflict, this film re-marks the traditional story of Aladdin’s Lamp and the Genie with overtones of American power, as well as reinscribing it with the cultural commodities of Disney, making the film self-reflexive, in that Disney’s own cinematic history is written into the Distory of Aladdin.

 

As in The Jungle Book, Disney begins the film by marking off its subjects as the cultural Other for America. The theme song that runs over the opening credits sums up the barbarity of this place: “Oh I come from a land / From a faraway place / Where the caravan camels roam / Where it’s black and immense / And the heat is intense / It’s barbaric — but hey, it’s home.” Originally, though, these lyrics portrayed a much darker, more evil portrait of its subjects, one which Arab-American groups protested heavily. Since then, Disney has rewritten the lyrics to make the place, but not the people, seem barbaric; previously, the fourth and fifth lines, the offensive ones in the original theatrical release, read “where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face” (“It’s Racist, But Hey, It’s Disney,” New York Times, 14 July 1993, A18). Hence, the barbaric “nature” of Arabs in this film remains; however, it becomes disguised in the nature of the land in which these people live; as the editorial notes, “To characterize an entire region with this sort of tongue-in-cheek bigotry, especially in a movie aimed at children, borders on barbaric” (loc. cit.).

 

The barbarism of Arab justice (both in the removal of one’s ear “if they don’t like your face,” as well as the removal of the hands of thieves) also harkens to the portrayal of Western capitalism — those who steal from the King (and here, as Jafar points out when disguised as a prisoner so as to lure Aladdin into taking him to the Cave of Wonders, where the Genie’s lamp is stashed, “Whoever has the gold makes the rules”) deserve to have their hands removed. Aladdin, though, has to wonder — “All this for a loaf of bread?” — thereby giving voice to what could be called the proletariat. However, here the proletariat is definitely not glorified; instead, Aladdin is portrayed throughout the film as “nothing but a street rat,” and has to use the power of the Genie in order to make himself appear appreciable to the local gentry, in particular Princess Jasmine. But, there is another allegory of American capitalism here — the desire to throw off the chains of royalty — and indolence — and become an “everyman,” or in this case, where Princess Jasmine runs off from the castle and goes into the marketplace, “everyperson.” In a sense, then, we can see that the film gives the message that neither of the two typifications of Arab society — the egregiously wealthy or the “street rat” peasant — are acceptable within Disney’s Arabia; instead, what is needed are self-made individuals (à la Pinocchio), who have the ability to judiciously live within, throw out, or rewrite tradition as it suits their needs. In Aladdin, this becomes Aladdin’s use of the Genie in order to make himself noticeable to the Princess; the Princess no longer taking orders as to whom she shall marry, and her act of convincing her father to rewrite the law so that she can marry Aladdin; and the Genie desiring to become his own master. All of this, though, is still inscribed within Jafar’s and Marx’s maxim (to paraphrase), “Whoever has the gold makes the rules,” as it is still the King who enables Princess Jasmine and Aladdin to be married. Hence, the rules of capitalism still hold, even in the strange, barbaric place that Aladdin calls home.

 

Unlike the three films I have discussed above, or any of the other animated features that I have chosen not to examine, Aladdin marks the first time that WDC has inscribed its own history into the history of the film. As Fjellman points out, “The Company has managed to insinuate its characters, stories, and image as good, clean, fun enterprise into the consciousness of millions around the earth” (Fjellman 1992:398), and the sublimation of Disney products into the consciousness of the viewer makes it easy for the same process to occur in the telling of the story, even though it takes place well in the past. At one point, the Genie catches Aladdin telling a lie, and briefly transforms his head into that of Pinocchio’s, complete with foot-and-a-half long nose. In another scene, once Aladdin, posing as Prince Ali Ababwa, has won the heart of Princess Jasmine, is asked by the Genie: “What are you going to do now?” in the same manner as WDC has commercials with victorious sports teams and Miss America beauty pageant winners responding to this question with, “I’m going to Disneyland [or Walt Disney World, or Tokyo Disneyland or EuroDisney].” Finally, at the end of the film, when the Genie is released by Aladdin and becomes his own master — in other words, when he wins the battle of capitalism, having been in servitude for thousands and thousands of years, only to finally make himself his own boss — he is going to Disneyland, or at least Walt Disney World; dressed in an obnoxious tropical print shirt, carrying golf clubs, and wearing a Goofy hat, he looks as if he is headed to one of the theme parks, with the intention of partaking of all of its leisure activities. Hence, Disney’s own history, being bound up with the collective conscience of the world, also gets bound up with the local stories of the world, regardless of how far away those locales might be.

 

Overall, then, we can see that the guiding pattern behind Disney’s use of local stories or histories, or their creation of stories that are meant to represent local ones (as in the case of The Three Caballeros), is the story-telling of the expansion of American political, economic and cultural imperialistic power in the second half of the twentieth century. The Three Caballeros intends to export the “truth” of the American Way (at least as Nelson Rockefeller and Walt Disney saw it) to Latin and South America; instead, the truth that gets told — and it is a truth of the American Way, even in the era of NAFTA, where Chile and Brazil are two of the most important trading partners of the US and are first in line to join the free trade agreement — that Latin America is a commodifiable good, one which can be consumed by the distant visitor (through films, travel books, and the like), but is under “no threat” (at least not sexually, as Burton points out) from America, because, just like Donald Duck, we are all engaged in the process of enjoying life. The Jungle Book allegorically transplants the original colonial story from British-ruled India to Viet Nam, and conveys a story of the success of American military troops in the region at that point in time. It also begins to more concretely display America’s attitude to the rest of the world that lay outside of North America and Western Europe: whereas in The Three Caballeros America was portrayed as un amigo to the region south of the Rio Grande, the films from The Jungle Book on show its subjects as cultural Others that are in general inferior, either morally or politically, to the United States. Aladdin does this by showing the barbarity of a place that would cut the hands off thieves who steal a loaf of bread — without admitting that the capitalist system does the same thing to the proletariat, and instead only respects those who play on the Catch-22 of capitalist society: it takes capital to get capital.

 

An additional point on this matter: Disney seems to be legitimating, in the sense of providing justifications of the way that the world is, the cultural, political and economic oppositions that the United States government sets up for itself. As Fjellman points out, “Legitimations come in many shapes and sizes. . . . They help people — both socialized old-timers and especially newcomers such as children or immigrants — to understand daily life in a locally correct fashion. At the same time, legitimations justify the world. They tell us not only what our world is like but also why it is, and perhaps should be, as it is” (Fjellman 1992:27). And as Lincoln advises, “They [agents of either social order or social change] can advance novel lines of interpretation for an established myth or modify details in its narration and thereby change the nature of the sentiments (and the society) it evokes” (Lincoln 1989:25). With the “ever-changing” world typified by the changing formations of the production of capital, as well as its organization both economically and politically throughout the world, there needs to be some sort of legitimating mechanism by which the political arena can be made to seem “natural,” or at least naturalized, to the citizens whose government feels need an enemy — or at least a cultural Other to demarcate themselves from. In The Three Caballeros, the opposition is clearly a North-South opposition, one which restated the geographic claim made in the Monroe Doctrine a century and a half before the film came out that Latin and South America were clearly in the realm of the US — if not politically (as most of the US’s puppet regimes were falling apart by that point) then at least economically, in the sense of being commodifiable and commodifying. The Jungle Book clearly makes the civilization-“jungle” opposition; Mowgli is always running from civilization, primarily under Baloo the (American) Bear’s direction to stay away from the “man-village,” and is only drawn into it by the “civilizing” effect of The Girl, who appears at the end of the film singing about her own servitude.⁵ Aladdin reiterates the civilization-barbarity opposition, but this time also inscribes a Christian-Islam opposition, one which in the context of the Persian Gulf conflict, as well as Margaret Thatcher’s recent comments in Toronto that “Islamic fundamentalism is a threat that is equal to if not greater than that of communism,” further serves to demarcate an enemy that can be rewritten as equal to or greater than Hitler. Hence, we can see that Disney’s animated features, in their appropriation of local stories and histories, reinscribe them with the current political, economic, cultural, and ideological discourse about America’s place in the world order.

 

An argument could be made that, instead of reinscribing these local stories with the discourse of American imperialism, be it political, economic, or cultural, that instead the opposite process occurs. That is, that with the expansion of American political power into different pockets of the world, such as Viet Nam, the Middle East, and Africa, that interest in these stories is peaked because of the interest in the news stories about these regions, and that therefore WDC, instead of offering these animated films up as justifications for American imperialism, are merely responding to a perceived need. This would then place WDC in the light of being a “good capitalist company,” in the sense of answering the needs of the consumer with a commodity, instead of being an ideological arm of the United States government. Whereas historical work done on the early films produced by the Disney studios, and especially The Three Caballeros, has shown that WDC was recruited by the US government to provide ideological support for the expansion of political power,⁶ there is little or no recent evidence (save the charge that Walt Disney himself served as a “special informant” for the Federal Bureau of Investigation after World War Two, which appeared in Marc Eliot’s 1993 unauthorized biography, Walt Disney: Hollywood’s Dark Prince) that WDC has since been involved with the US government. Yet, I maintain that the Disney company — not only in its animated features, but also in its live-action films and its theme parks, to which I turn next — is instrumental in providing in commodity form what Fjellman and Lincoln have both called “legitimations” for America’s position in the world order and its depiction of its cultural Others, which are intended for consumption not only by those who would be most likely to believe these legitimations, but also by those who “need” to internalize these depictions. As Dorfman and Mattelart put it, Disney’s films define their — America’s — cultural and political others as the US wishes to see them as well as the way in which”the local people are supposed to see [it] themselves.”⁷ I turn now to another of the ways in which viewers — or here, visitors — are supposed to internalize Disney’s view of the world: in the theme park.

 

“It’s a Small World, After All:” Disney’s “Historicidal” Ride

 

Again, conceptually making the leap from textual analyses of Disney animated features to a structural analysis of the Disney theme parks, especially Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and the way in which they convey, in easily consumable ways, allegories of the American view of the world, of history, and the way in which people should view themselves seems to be quite a leap, one akin to the “lover’s leap” of lore. The mutual advertisement of Disney’s products by other divisions (for example, advertising the theme parks in print ads for films), as well as having the Disney films be the basis for many of the attractions within the parks, allow me to make this jump. As well, the usage of the World’s Fair as a model for the Disney theme parks (Sorkin 1992: 216) provides with me the ability to analyze the Disney parks (and here, I focus only upon Disneyland, as I was an employee there for eighteen months and know it best; I will later make reference to the other parks, all of which are based upon Disneyland) as portrayals of the continuation of the colonial world order. Similar to the way Mitchell notes that the placement of buildings provides a meaning to those buildings, I would argue that the placement of attractions, in combinations that are neither geographically, politically, or temporally similar, imbues them with Disney’s meaning:

 

In the order of an exhibitional world, such as Lyautey's Rabat, each building and each object appeared to stand for some further meaning or value, and these meanings appeared to stand apart as a realm of order and institutions, indeed as the very realm of the political. The effect of meaning, however, as we might expect from the discussion of language in the previous chapter, actually arose not from each building or object in itself but out of the continuous weave of buildings and objects in which an individual item occurred. . . . To create the effect of a realm of meaning, this differential process was to mark every space and every gap. (Mitchell 1988: 162-63)

 

In the construction of the Disneyland theme park, then, the gaps between places, politics, and times disappears, and is reconstituted by the imputation of American imperialist discourse, masked by the cuteness and the production of fun.

 

The same process that I have described in regard to Disney’s animated features — their appropriation from local situations, reinscription in American imperialist discourse, and resale to “the locals” (as will be described below) — also occurs with regards to the attractions at Disneyland. Many of the attractions are based on the animated films, so that the decontextualization is bound up directly with the creation of the rides, and is subsequently enhanced with the inclusion of only the most exciting aspects of each story. Hence, the Pinocchio, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and others are all further decontextualized when brought into the theme park, as only the most exciting or dangerous (in the Disney sense) elements of the story are brought into the ride. However, the majority of the attractions at Disneyland, as well as at the other Disney theme parks, are not based on animated films, but are rather based upon Distorified versions of aspects of American history or of its perception of the world around it. Hence, there is no literary or cinematic basis for them — and therefore no direct history that they must refer to — and the rides can thus construct any type of history, or in this case Distory, that the imagineers (those who design the rides, films, etc.) wish; and these rides can be combined geographically in order to present Disney’s vision of the world as it should have been — with him at the centre.

 

Rides like Pinocchio, Splash Mountain (based on the film Song of the South), and Star Tours (based on the Return of the Jedi installation in the Star Wars trilogy) all deny their origins, and are thereby recontextualized in whatever way WDC wishes geographically. The placement of rides in Fantasyland — which includes all of the old “fairy tales” and legends of Europe, such as “The Sword in the Stone” (the legend of King Arthur), Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan (Disney’s version, not Barrie’s; Forgacs 1992:369), and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, a depiction of the intrusion of the automobile into the British countryside — inscribes these histories as being in the land of”fantasy.” As well, Splash Mountain, based on Song of the South, which contains the line, “This is how the niggers sing,”⁸ disguises its origins in the lore of American slavery, and instead exists in the fantastic realm of Critter Country. And Star Tours, which oxymoronically lies in Tomorrowland, since the Star Wars films took place “long long ago, in a galaxy far, far away,” is removed from its “historical” context, and placed in the land of tomorrow (which, thanks to its dating as being the land of 1984, is now the land of yesterday).

 

Other rides, not based on the animated features, also are grouped without regard to their political or geographic context. The Jungle Cruise, for example, puts together “scenes” from Southeast Asia, India, and the African veldt and rain forests, connected by the Irrawaddy, Congo, and Nile Rivers. This ride is located between the Enchanted Tiki Room, a 1950’s-style, Don Ho-genre depiction of life in the South Pacific through big-band translations of some local music; Aladdin’s Oasis, a restaurant and Broadway-style dinner show based on the Aladdin film; and the Swiss Family Treehouse, a six-story cement tree showing scenes from the film which took place off the Caribbean coast of South America. Another ride has been built in Adventureland. The Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Eye ride is based on the Raiders of the Lost Ark film (now licensed by WDC), and entails the same sort of trip through a Mayan pyramid, except in 1930’s-style German troop transports. All of this, grouped under the heading of “Adventureland,” completely ignores the geographic contexts (and instead becomes “Everything outside of North America or Western Europe-Land”), and ignores the political context of the locales represented — all of the areas presented here either were or, in the case of the Middle East, are coming (as I have described above) under the strong-arm of American imperialism.

 

In fact, in all of the lands that make up Disneyland time becomes the defining nature of the land, as opposed to space. As Fjellman notes, at Walt Disney World, where the themed lands are different from those at the California park,

 

Each part of the Magic Kingdom has a temporal theme. Liberty Square represents colonial America and the War of Independence. Frontierland glosses the nineteenth-century American West. Main Street USA gives us a turn-of-the-century small town. Adventureland alludes to the history of empire -- from the Spanish Main to the African safari. Even Fantasyland is about time, suggesting simultaneously the timelessness of fairy tales and children's stories and the romanticized medieval castles of central Europe with a bit of King Arthur thrown in. (Fjellman 1992:61)

 

I would go even further than this to argue that the spatial organization of Disneyland, based as it is on space-as-time themed lands, organizes the history of the world which Disney encountered and arranges it in such a way that history becomes the way he wanted it (Fjellman 1992:59). There appear to be two temporal eras represented in Disneyland — the Past and the Future, combined to make the Timeless. Main Street USA, Frontierland, New Orleans Square, Critter Country, Adventureland, and Fantasyland combine to make up the Lands of the Past; and Tomorrowland is designed to be the Land of the Future, but because of its 1984 dating loses that designation. To be precise, all of these lands, when taken out of all of their respective temporal settings and political geographies, become Timeless, and are only given a temporal designation at the hands of WDC. An example: Until 1994, the Jungle Cruise was one of the more contemporary rides. It had opened with the park in 1955, and had, through various updatings of its scripts, maintained its contemporaneity; it even featured jokes such as “Now we return you to the biggest jungle of them all — the California freeway system.” However, with the addition of the 1930’s style Indiana Jones ride, WDC wanted everything restaged so that the entire area of Adventureland would be set in the 1930’s. In order to achieve this, Disneyland redesigned the facade and queue area of the Jungle Cruise ride so that it would go through a pithy colonial governor’s mansion, as well as docks of this era, making apparent the political temporality of this ride, while reducing the meaning that this would give the ride through the pithiness of its decoration. While this expresses a seemingly new-found concern for the temporality of its staging, it also shows that within the terms of Disneyland all things — even time — are under the control of Uncle Walt.⁹

 

We can see that the temporal and geographic setting of various world locales becomes seemingly arbitrary for Disney in Disneyland. However, as I have shown above, this setting is not wholly arbitrary; it instead conveys a very strong message not only about the power of Disney, but also of America. All things that are included within the Park fall under the allegorical purview of the United States’ imperialist power, be it political, economic, or cultural; and Disney has the power to organize them in such a way so that this power seems to disappear. As Mitchell points out in regards to the presentation of Egypt in various World’s Fairs, as well as the colonial restructuring of Egyptian cities,

 

The Orient is put together as this "re-presentation," and what is represented is not a real place but a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seem to have its origin in a quotation, or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these. (Mitchell 1988:31)

 

And it is well-known that Disney did not explore at length the areas which he chose to represent in the Parks; unlike the nature films that WDC produced, which take painstaking detail and magnify it (although they misled people worldwide into thinking that lemmings are suicidal), most of the other films are no more than a series of quotations from first impressions or from “travel books,” as in The Three Caballeros.¹⁰ These quotations are then organized in the way in which Disney would have wanted them to appear had he written “history,” and are presented as a legitimation of the world order and America’s place within it. The ordering of these political, cultural, and geographic fragments are then ordered by WDC in such a way that it provides a hierarchy, in which, as Fjellman notes, Disneyland and America are presented as heaven, with all else below (Mitchell 1988:60; Fjellman 1992:317). Disneyland then becomes an exhibition of American cultural, political, and economic power, with Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse at the centre of the exhibition, and serves as a cultural legitimation of American power. As Fjellman points out, legitimations often exist for those who are new to a society, either children or recent immigrants (Fjellman 1992:27); and from nearly 18 months of fieldwork within Disneyland, I have found that the greatest numbers of people who come to Disneyland for the first time (Disney placed the California park where he did so that he could attract repeat business from those who lived nearby in the burdgeoning Orange County) are either children or visitors and immigrants from foreign countries. As I have noted above (p. 4), Disney desired to represent the American Way so that it would be timeless — or, in other words, so that his representation of America’s position in the world would last for all time. This, then, is the way in which consumers (or “guests,” in Disney parlance) come to the Disney products — as if they are Timeless, and are therefore easily consumable in whatever temporal or spatial context one is in. I turn now to the marketing of this timelessness of American cultural power, presented by the Walt Disney Company.

 

“It’s A Small World,” For All Time: Selling the American Way

 

Examining the way in which WDC sells its products, namely the theme parks and the films, must begin with the animated films. However, as I have noted above, each of Disney’s products sells all of the others, so that we could start anywhere in their product line with this analysis. But, the theme of timelessness is paramount to the understanding of Disney’s marketing strategies, and nothing better offers this up than the animated films of Disney. So, it is there that I will start, and then turn to the theme parks, which are the embodment of this timelessness; and it is the recycling of both of these products for the consumption by Disney’s “guests” that allows for the timelessness of the product, as well as these timeless products, to exist for all time, thereby perpetually reselling the timeless hegemony of the United States.

 

As I have already written above, WDC has the effect of producing a de-temporalization of its films, primarily by removing them from the original political and geographic context, but also, as in the case of The Jungle Book, by translating stories already inscribed with imperialist discourse into non-indigenous locales, which also has the effect of making these films seem “out of time,” or at least not governed by time. This process does not work as well for the live-action films, primarily because film quality, as well as topical interests (such as the Davy Crockett chronicles, which were hugely popular in the 1950’s), make these films seem somehow “older” or at least “dated,” and so interest in them seems to disappear.

 

Another way in which WDC maintains interest in the animated features is by periodically recycling them in and out of circulation. WDC has a hard-and-fast policy that dictates how many of its films may be in video stores at a time and how long each of them may remain there (approximately two to three years). Additionally, WDC periodically re-releases feature films into theatres, giving new generations a chance to see Disney’s self-declared classics. In doing this, WDC plays on a sense of nostalgia that parents have for the films (as they seem to be able to relive their childhood through them), and increases the drawing power of the films by making them available “for a limited time only.” WDC thus creates a sense of excitement about the ability to see the film, something which often prompts parents to purchase the film so that they can hold onto it for all time, showing it to their children, grandchildren, etc. As Forgacs notes,

 

It is remarkable that in this process of recycling and global rereleasing the animated features do not seem to age. They just do not look as old as other films do. In reality this magic of eternal youth has a lot to do with the way the films are promoted and publicized. Disney is very skillful at presenting its old films as "classics," at once perennial, timeless fantasies and the standard versions of the stories they adapt. (Forgacs 1992:368)

 

Another aspect of the removal of the past from Disney’s temporal repertoire is the absence of parental figures in the animated features. There are no parents in Disney’s films: Gepetto is an uncle figure to Pinocchio; both Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse have no children, but are instead also uncles; and even Bambi’s mother gets killed in the process of Bambi’s growing-up. By doing this, as Dorfman and Mattelart argue, WDC can create a world in which there is no reference to the past, and therefore no history; I would take this further to argue that, by the Distorifying process, whereby everything bad that has happened in the past is erased or elided, everything that could be “historical” is instead rendered timeless, and therefore always already temporally there (Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:34). By removing the possibility of temporality from the animated features, WDC makes it possible for ever-increasing numbers of generations to consume its animated products, thereby allowing WDC’s messianic message of the hegemony of the United States to be recycled throughout time.

 

Since all of Disney’s products sell each other (in the sense of everything being cross-marketed), I would argue that this also works for the theme parks. In other words, the message that history, geography, and politics do not matter when it comes to the fun that Disneyland and the other theme parks delivers, captured in the ordering of the conceptual space that governs Disneyland (centered as it is around Walt Disney himself, both conceptually and geographically), is constantly consumed and reconsumed by countless generations. By refining older rides, such as “The Jungle Cruise,” which was recently turned into a 1930’s-era colonial governor’s home and dock (making explicit for once what “colonialism” was really like — cute, punny, and over in eight minutes), as well as introducing new rides and lands periodically, Disney attempts to constantly remake itself so that it appears bigger and better. At the same time, though, the messages that Disney sends out about America’s place in the world do not change, as the geography of the park cannot change, as cannot its de-temporalization. Hence, the idea that anything that involves Adventure has to take place outside of North America and Western Europe, and therefore in the realm of America’s cultural others, can be always consumed by new “guests” to Disney’s social order, and thus America’s cultural, political, and economic hegemony are constantly re-legitimated for the benefit of those who are new to “the Wonderful World of Disney.”

 

As I have said above, the guiding metaphor for Disney’s theme parks, and its products more generally, is that of the “It’s a Small World” ride. In it, Audio-Animatronic dolls from all over the world dressed in “native” clothing sing in harmony the most maddening of songs, “It’s a Small World After All,” which is occasionally interspersed with countermelodies such as “Hava Nagila” and “The Mexican Hat Dance.” Here, though, the geographic message that Disneyland delivers in a more disguised fashion is made clear; as Fjellman puts it, “It is as if a forest — any forest — is chosen cavalierly to represent the idea of a place and time, and then infinite energy is directed toward the scrutiny of each leaf and each piece of bark on each tree” (Fjellman 1992:87). This, then, is the message of Disney’s portrayal of geography, and with it the politics, economics, and culture that is elided in the name of American imperialism: “If there is anything to be learned by this average citizen about geography — cultural, political or otherwise — [Walt Disney Company] will teach it” (Fjellman 1992:224).

 

One question that arises when considering the ability of the theme parks to sell the message of American dominance of the world and its relevant political perspective that I have highlighted in this paper concerns the relative success of the Disney theme parks around the world. Disneyland and Walt Disney World in the US are fanatically attended, to the point that Disneyana conventions, held to allow collectors of Disney paraphenalia to trade and amass further stocks of the trinkets, become madhouses, and on the average day Disneyland has a population greater than probably sixty percent of the towns and cities in North America (its average daily attendance hovers around thirty thousand people; personal conversation with Guest Services, Disneyland Park, March 1995), while Walt Disney World’s population hovers around one hundred thousand per day. Tokyo Disneyland is also well attended and successful. However, the EuroDisney park near Paris is a near failure; reports consistently appear highlighting its financial troubles. One might ask why this phenomenon has occurred. I would argue that the EuroDisney park is placed within a political culture that is hostile to imperialist intentions as well as the “Small Worldization” of its local cultures (within the context of the burgeoning European Union, France, for one, is highly critical of the flattening of national differences in the name of a common European identity and society), while the political culture surrounding Tokyo Disneyland is a recent artifact highly influenced by the American reconstruction of the Japanese political, economic, and social systems after World War Two. Even considering Japan’s historic isolation and resistance to efforts aimed towards its colonization, I would argue that the reconstruction of Japanese society by the American military, coupled with the highly commodified culture that both Japanese and American societies share, prove to be rich ground for the propagation of Disney’s messages regarding the place of the United States in the world.

 

Given the colonizing effects of the messages that Disneyland, as well as WDC’s other products, most notably the animated film features, it is not surprising that people who lived around Manassas, Virginia, were up in arms about Disney’s America theme park that it wanted to build. They were afraid of losing the actuality of the lived history of the Civil War — a heritage that lived on in the area, though not in the same fashion as history in most of the rest of the world (Silberman 1994:25) — to the dehistoricizing effects of “Daddy Disney.” As the previews for Disney’s latest animated feature, Pocahontas, run through my head, they were correct in fearing this. Pocahontas is portrayed in the preview (an actual musical number from the up-coming film) as an earth-loving, submissive woman to be won by the heart of the colonialist John Smith, something quite strange to have said about someone whose name, given by her father, meant “mischievous.” Disney’s overall policy towards the past, the present, and the future, as well as toward the world around him, was to turn it into the playland that it never was. Disney’s goal was to rewrite history “the way it should have been” (Fjellman 1992:31). And, as Barbara Crosette’s New York Times article (12 February 1995:E5) suggests, it appears that the future Disney wanted for America came true, as it appears that, even though “it is all but impossible to find a hegemonistic bone in any body in Washington — Republican or Democrat,” one is no longer needed, as the imperialist messages of Disney, as well as those of the American government in general, have been well received by so-called Third World countries, looking to the United States to become the hegemon it wanted to be, hopefully without the US allowing the further exploitation of histories in the course of the exploitation of countries. I can only hope that, for the sake of those who have had their histories taken from them by the “‘rapacious strip-miner’in the goldmine of legend and myth” (Kunzle, in Dorfman and Mattelart 1971:18), that it can begin to rewrite its own history as it should have been — indebted to those who had history before, and will continue to have a history well after, Walt Disney and his imagineering of history.

Notes

 

1. While I do not make explicit reference to the original stories, the original stories used in the films that are discussed here–The Jungle Book and A Thousand and One Arabian Nights–are relatively well-known, and I presume a knowledge of these original texts in my analysis.

 

2. Burton, “Don (Juanito) Duck,” p. 35: “The Disney team apparently felt the need to reassure their Latin American counterparts that they need feel no threat to their sexual hegemony from this North American neighbor who, for all his quacking up and cracking up, is clearly incapable of shacking up.”

 

3. As well as all other Disney films: I chose to examine the animated films here primarily because they are my “favourites”; as well, they are also the most accessible, in the sense of being able to rent them at video stores. Part of the reason for this, as I will discuss later, is that the animated features seem “less dated” than the live-action films, and therefore are better “sellers,” in the sense of being accepted by a larger paying audience. However, the live-action films serve much the same function as the animated features; they continue to play up the political, economic, and cultural primacy and hegemony of the U.S.

 

4. Many of the Subaltern Studies group have commented at length on the colonizing writings of those who were associated with the British rulers or the raj. I would argue that Kipling would be part of this group.

 

5. I have written on this, as well as the imposition of an American nuclear family structure on the text of the film, elsewhere. See Schaffer, “The Bare Necessities: Family Structure and Gender Inversion in Disney’s The Jungle Book” (unpublished).

 

6. Burton’s essay in Nationalisms and Sexualities provides extensive evidence of the linkages between the Disney studios and the US government during and just after World War Two. However, the Walt Disney Studios’ archives have become over the years increasingly more difficult to obtain access to, and inquiring writers must have their projects approved by WDC in order to gain access to the archives.

 

7. Kunzle,”Translator’s Preface,” in Dorfman and Mattelart, p. 19. Burton also points out that Saludos Amigos, the precursor to The Three Caballeros, “became the first Hollywood film to premiere in all Latin American countries before opening in the U. S.” (Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up [Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1987]:40) The only complaints received during the tour of this film were from Uruguay, which was not represented in the film. The gauchito sequence in The Three Caballeros resolves this problem. (Burton 1992:40n10)

 

8. An interesting anecdotal note: Due to this line, as well as its general portrayal of the myths of African-American slaves, the Disney Company has removed Song of the South from the shelves of video stores in the United States. I have recently been asked — by a current Disney employee — to send copies of this film to the United States from my residence in Toronto.

 

9. Until 1984, WDC owned even the airspace rights over Disneyland, so that no plane or helicopter could fly over the Magic Kingdom without the permission of the Company. In 1984, Michael Eisner sold the airspace rights in order to put more liquid cash into the Company’s coffers.

 

10. Burton, p. 40 n11: Here, Burton comments on Smoodin’s comment on the “flawless calculus of cultural imperialism” that allowed “Walt Disney, a representative of the United States, could tour a foreign culture [actually, several different cultures and subcultures], come to understand it in just a short time, and then bring it back home, all with the blessing and the thanks of the culture he had visited.” (From Smoodin, Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era [1994: New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press])

 

Works Cited

 

• Bauman, Zygmunt.  Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993.
• Burton, Julianne. “Don (Juanito) Duck and the Imperial-Patriarchal Unconscious: Disney Studios, the Good Neighbor Policy, and the Packaging of Latin America.” In Andrew Parker, et. al., Nationalisms and Sexualities. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
• Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: International General, 1971.
• Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
• Fjellman, Stephen. Vinyl Leaves: Walt Disney World and America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.
• Forgacs, David. “Disney animation and the business of childhood.” Screen 33:361-74 (1992).
• Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York and London: Routledge, 1992.
• Itwaru, Arnold and Natasha Ksonzek. Closed Entrances: Canadian Culture and Imperialism. Toronto: TSAR, 1994.
• Kunzle, David. Translator’s Preface to Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 1975.
• Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Mitchell, Timothy. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.
• Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Silberman, Neil Asher. “The Battle Disney Should Have Won”. Lingua Franca 5: 24-28 (1994).
• Sorkin, Michael. “See You in Disneyland.” In Sorkin, ed. Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. New York: The Noonday Press, 1992.