Animating cultural politics: Disney, race, and social movements in the 1990s.

Abstract

The ideological power of popular culture, and especially of movies, has always prompted public dispute. Arguably the leading producer of popular culture today and a corporate global giant, The Walt Disney Company has mass marketed animated features since 1937. While some of these films are still remembered for their racist elements, the company took a new creative turn in the 1990s, producing three animated features depicting racial Otherness: <italic>Aladdin </italic> (1992), <italic>The Lion King</italic> (1994), and <italic>Pocahontas </italic> (1995). Each film produced a different critical outcome: the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee surprised Disney with a successful challenge of <italic>Aladdin </italic>'s most egregious representations; Disney avoided the multicultural challenge in <italic>The Lion King</italic> with minority participation and anthropomorphicization; and in the eyes of many, Disney met the multicultural challenge with their story, their casting, and their animation in <italic> Pocahontas</italic>. Drawing upon interviews with leading figures and archival research I use an eventful sociology of culture to explain these varying critical fields and the conditions for social movement challenges. The debates inspired reveal a struggle over what counts as <italic>racist</italic> as opposed to what counts as '<italic>multicultural</italic>' or '<italic> Politically Correct</italic>.' These cultural contests cannot be neatly polarized, however, into struggles between a corporate producer and the victims of Disney's hegemony. Disney limits its multicultural liability to the extent that it incorporates actors, activists, and experts from communities associated with those it claims to represent, and to the extent that the filmmakers avoid explicit identification with any community through their animation technique or story lines. Movements tend to remain beyond Disney's multicultural account when community participation is excluded and when the movement maintains solidarity and effective management of the media. In highlighting the conditions of movement mobilization and the production of Disney's hegemonic multiculturalism, I conclude that Disney's increasing sophistication in marketing and producing animated multicultural fare invites new alliances among minority movements. In addition, while blatantly racist representations and exclusions still motivate movements into action, the complexity of racism in the multicultural media market suggests that movements attend to new forms of cultural critique in their production of an alternative politics of representation.