Kinsman, Gwendolyn

ENG 3140

May 1st, 2012

Colonization Is Still Alive and Well and It’s All Your Fault: Or Colonizing of the

Mind and the Stranglehold Disney Has on the World

What even is post colonialism? If one were to ask a random person on the street that had

no idea, most people would hazard a guess that it was simply the era after colonialism, and they

would be partially right. It does reference the era after colonialism in the mid-20th century. Post

colonialism is prevalent in nations that were colonized, and then gained their independence,

either after a rebellion or after a peaceful transference of power from the colonizer to the

colonized. However, if one were to ask the same random stranger if colonialism is truly dead,

and by that, I mean, does colonization mean only colonization of a nation or people in a nation,

by another country or nation state? Can colonization happen to a group of people by some other

entity or force? The answer to that question is complicated, but ultimately, yes it can. In fact, all

people are colonized every day; the colonization is that of the mind. In particular, one particular

corporation has a stranglehold on the minds of a good population of the world, particularly in the

United States, and that corporation would be Disney.

Of course, many would balk at the notion that they could be colonized, as they are free to

do what they wish, that no one from Disney, nor is Disney themselves forcing anyone to watch

their films, go to their parks, or buy any of their merchandise. No, this colonization is something

that we do to ourselves, and it does not happen to us by force or because we are not strong

enough to stop it, it happens because we are ambivalent and because we buy into what Disney is

selling.

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In order to truly lay out this new form of colonization that has become prevalent in the

world we must look at two post-colonial philosophers in Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, who

both spent a great deal of time laying out the ideas of post colonialism, Orientalism, and the

Subaltern. These terms are intertwined and when dealing with post colonialism, go hand in hand.

In “Orientalism”, Said tells us that Orientalism is this basic idea that there is something

fundamentally diametrically opposed between Western and Eastern societies. This idea isn’t

really questioned, because it is true both hemispheres of the world buy into different cultures,

into different belief systems, and their way of life are vastly different, however, Orientalism goes

further than that. Orientalism also claims that there is a stereotype from the Western perspective

that those from the Orient or East are, “exotic, pre-modern, emotional, and indolent.” (Dittmer

18). In, Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film, Mary Hamer makes the assertion that it isn’t

that Orientalism completely ignores the Eastern cultures and societies, it’s that they do

acknowledge them and study them, and then measure their culture and society against their own,

and find ways to subvert any and all evidence that there may be something to the Eastern way of

life. She claims, “Orientalism is seductive; it offers forms for European pleasures.” (Bernstein

271.) In other words, Orientalism allows the Western world to justify what they are doing, their

way of life and thinking, because the thing they are measuring is diametrically opposed to them,

and anything that is different, must be bad or “exotic”. In the term of orientalism, exotic does not

mean beautiful and desirable as it does today. Exotic, in terms of orientalism, means wild or

dangerous, or something to be frightened of. She also claims that, “The most effective counter to

the fantasies of Orientalism, it has been argued, is to measure them against the historical record.”

(Bernstein 271). She claims that many authors and artists from the time were accused of

ignoring anything true and historical, so as to keep up the fiction of the Eastern setting and to

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perpetuate the notion of Orientalism. Said himself claimed in Orientalism, “The Orient was

Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be ‘Oriental’ in all those ways considered

commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be- that is,

submitted to being-made Oriental.” (Bernstein 305). Choo asserts,

Said convinced the West of what the East already knew, that the Orient is a Western

invention. For Said, Orientalism is the form imperialism takes in the Orient. What

constitutes the superior West (modernity, scientific advances, and technical advantages)

and what constitutes the inferior Orient (superstition, adherence to ‘tradition’, spirituality

as wisdom) have a strong foundation in the colonial quest for wealth and profit.

(Bernstein 305).

In other words, the very idea of colonialism and imperialism lends itself to Orientalism, it

is the very justification of taking away the same humanity of those being colonized, so as not, to

offend ones sensibilities and lead to guilt and shame for forcing a group of people to submit to

someone who simply knows better, because they are better. If one can justify their actions and

beliefs at the expense of another group of people and gain more land and profit in the meantime,

then why shouldn’t they? Once a group of people is forced to adhere to a fictional representation

of them by a group that has taken the power, they become mute and powerless. Shawn Rider in

his article, “The Silenced Majority: Colonization of the Mind and the Flesh Eating Zombie”

claims, “The relationship between the ruling and the ruled is a constant power struggle. Edward

Said buys into Foucault’s notions of power flow, in that power flow is set up so power flows

away from the native and toward the colonizers. Native language and religion are usurped by

“civilized” or “better” versions, destabilizing the native culture and of course the restabilizing

force is that of the colonizers.” (Rider 4-9). Once the natives buy into the new religion, language,

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and culture, the natives become the subaltern. The subaltern refers to according to Spivak, “In

postcolonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is

subaltern-—a space of difference.” (De Kock 45). To Spivak, the subaltern is those natives who

have been cast under the Orientalism lamp, those who have no voice, because it has been torn

away from them, it is those who have been cast as the role of, “The Other.” In terms of the

colonizer, “The Other” becomes the subaltern, it becomes the people that are different than them,

and by different it means, worse than. Of course the question Spivak poses then, is can this

group of people speak? Can a group that has had their voice taken away, actually speak?

Tabish Khair says in, “ Can the Subaltern Shout (and Smash)”, that Spivak’s notion of

the subaltern only being able to speak when they stop speaking as a subaltern, is wrong, and that

idea of speech being noise, or a sound made from one’s voice, is faulty. Speech can happen

through body language, through thought, through written word, and that the question of whether

or not the subaltern being able to speak is a rather stupid question. Of course, the subaltern can

speak, but the better question, can the subaltern ever be listened to? Meaning, can the subaltern

ever say anything that is listened to, welcomed, and adhered to? And that question is no. The

subaltern can say anything they want, but as long as they are only speaking to another subaltern,

the message means very little. It is like the phrase, “preaching to the choir”; subalterns could

speak all day long to each other. Nothing will ever happen, because simply put, they are

subaltern. As long as they are in that position, not speaking to the right people, not taking a stand

and shrugging off the oppression of being the subaltern, it doesn’t matter if they speak or not.

(Khair 10-15).

J. Maggio in his article, “Can the Subaltern be Heard?: Political Theory, Translation,

Representation, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak”, basically agrees with what Khair says about

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the subaltern. He claims that just because the colonizers refuse to listen to the subaltern when

they cry out, doesn’t mean the subaltern are not heard. There is a distinction between hearing

something and listening to someone. You can hear almost anything, but the things you choose to

actually listen to are the ones that get through and stay with you. In this, Maggio, faults Spivak

for her shortsightedness and her approach on the subaltern and the subject of speaking and being

heard. (Maggio 429-438)

Which leads to another question entirely, does the subaltern even want to speak? If the

subaltern are now colonized into believing they are in fact better off with the new colonizing

force, why would that group of people even want to speak out?

And this is where colonization of the mind comes into play. Marcelo Dascal claims in his

essay, “Colonizing and Decolonizing Minds”, “Whereas the most visible forms of political

colonialism have for the most part disappeared from the planet by the end of the millennium,

several of its consequences remain with us. ‘Postcolonial’ thinkers have undertaken not only to

analyze this phenomenon, but also to devise strategies for effectively combating and hopefully

eradicating colonialism’s most damaging aspect – the taking possession and control of its

victims’ minds.” (Dascal 1).

Many will ask, but what is it? The answer is complicated. “Colonization of the mind” is

a metaphor that shows how a colonizer forces their ideologies, beliefs, or some external source

into the mental sphere of its subjects. It thereby changes the subject’s way of thinking, and the

contents that are in the mind, because of this the effects of colonization of the mind are long

lasting, and last far longer than any physical ramifications of colonization. There is a clear

unevenness of power between the colonized and colonizer, once someone’s mind has been

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colonized they can be tricked into thinking they are either the colonizer or the colonized, and

most participate involuntarily, but some participate voluntarily, because they buy into what they

colonizers are selling. In terms of colonialism, colonization of the mind took place most often by

simply subverting cultural values like family, religion, music, and food and routinely showed the

colonized how they could be civilized like the colonizers and be better than they were, and

slowly over the course of time eradicated the former culture. (Dascal 1-26).

Then there is the argument that Dascal puts forward that says that even if one were to

shun the colonization of the mind of one group, another group would ultimately colonize the

mind anyway. There is no way to completely keep one’s mind free from colonization, because

life is made up of thought and action on those thoughts. (Dascal 21-22). Mary Douglas claims,

“The colonization of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought.” (Dascal 1). There is no

escaping colonization of the human mind, and that as long as humans are alive and are on earth,

colonization will be alive and well and has no end in sight. The physical action of colonization of

humans and land, came from the thought, and since then has been moved away from, but there is

nothing greater or scarier than being controlled by someone else or by having a thought or idea

implanted in your head by an outside source. In this, I think of the film Inception. The movie is a

science fiction thriller set in the world of dreams. A team of people can go into the dream world

of a subject and plant an idea so that the subject does what another person wants or desires. The

film itself is futuristic and seemingly farfetched, but the reality is that it happens every day to

nearly every person in the world. (Inception). We are affected by the words we read, hear, and

speak. The films we watch give us a message and implant in our mind, and things we may have

never thought about before believed, can become our greatest desires, wishes, and beliefs. All

because of something we read, heard, or saw.

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Salah Sabawi in his article, “Colonization of the Mind: Normalize This!”, “Normalization

is the colonization of the mind, whereby oppressed subjects come to believe that the oppressor’s

reality is the only “normal” reality that must be subscribed to, and that the oppression is a fact of

life that must be coped with.” (Sabawi). In Sabawi’s article he is referring to the conflict between

Israelis and Palestinians, but it holds true in almost form of colonization of the mind. And we can

see this in popular culture; such as films and music.

No corporation does this better than the Disney corporation, and it is not just in the films

they produce, but it’s in the theme parks they build, and the merchandise they sell. It is in their

wholesome, family fun image that allows them to reach the most innocent minds out there, and

that would be children. Disney is pretty genius in that in figured out the way to affect the future

is to get the children. By sugarcoating political ideas, beliefs, ideologies, and the patriarchal

society in which we live, and giving us beautiful animations, colors, and catchy songs that try to

deter away from the messages that are actually being portrayed in the film, we simply sit for two

hours and enjoy it all. Meanwhile, we’re being indoctrinated with all sorts of messages from race

to gender to political issues. We not only watch the films, but we also sit our children in front of

the screens and take a shower or get housework done, thinking there is nothing wrong in letting

our children watch a two hour movie about a lion or a rapscallion from the middle east. We take

our children to the parks, and buy the merchandise and buy into everything Disney tries to force-

feed us. (Nooshin 239). We simply believe that what we are watching is true, because it is

coming from a trusted source in Disney. If Disney is putting it in their films, then it must be

healthy and wholesome, right? And yet, while your children are watching these films they are

being taught that young men from the Middle East are thieves, liars, beggars, and that they can’t

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be trusted. Is it any wonder that when our children grow up, they believe it of all people from the

Middle East, as they did of Aladdin, when they were just children watching Aladdin?

Henry Giroux states, “When politics is cloaked in the image of innocence, there is more

at stake than simple deception. There is the issue of cultural power and how it influences public

understandings of the past, national identity, coherence, and popular memory as a site of

injustice, criticism, and renewal.” (Kraidy 45). Kraidy claims,

Disney’s Aladdin displays an aura of playfulness and innocence positing a utopian age of

purity. Beneath this harmless surface, however, a myriad of semiotic constellations

engage a plethora of signs in a powerful field of signification where constructions of race,

class, and gender are imbricated in monolithic formulae and reductive conventions

converging in the power dyad of a glamorized Self and a postulated other. Hollywood’s

ideological manufacturing of the Orient is one of the most enduring sites of Otherness in

American popular culture, Disney’s Aladdin is no exception to the rule. (Kraidy 45- 46).

In the film, we see an opening to Aggrabah, the stereotypical desert in Arab land.

According to Kraidy, “agrabah” phonetically literally means “barbaric”. And the opening song

actually includes the line, “It’s barbaric but it’s home.” (Aladdin 1992). It is no wonder that The

Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee strongly reacted to the film and called it

“unconscious racism”. The belief is that, Aladdin, as well as most other Disney films have a

subtle code in which they perpetuate their beliefs and ideologies, and are often overlooked or

ignored. In this film, it’s shown in the drawing of the sultan’s palace, in which it looks almost

exactly like the castle in the Disney Logo and the fact that Genie turns into Jack Nicholson. It’s

quite obvious that Aladdin is not a product of the Middle East, but of the world, Disney lives in.

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In fact, through the whole movie, Genie is an enigma. What even is he? Is he a slave to Aladdin,

or is a God-like figure because he gives Aladdin the script to the movie? He takes all sorts of

forms, his “normal” form is that of someone from the Middle East, but he becomes Jack

Nicholson, who is definitely not from the Middle East. In the end, Nora Bathaiser says in her

article “A Whole New World- Rereading Disney Animation of the Early 1990s”, “Genie

incorporates all these forms and has even more shapes. His transcendental figure is closely

connected to the culture: the genie-essence is related to the myths and legends of the Arab world,

but the forms he takes and the people he embodies are from the American and Western World.”

(Borthaiser 9). In other words, the Genie is a nice show of being someone from the Middle East,

but really, he is just another stereotype and only serves the purpose to further propagate the idea

of Orientalism. She claims, “Films like Aladdin gives us an interpretation of the Arab World

through the lens of the American Disney. Several further principles are responsible for this

phenomenon. Disney films represent other cultures “as if they could not represent themselves.”

(Borthaiser 2). (Said Orientalism 875).

She goes on to say that, the representation of the United States versus the Middle East is

shown in how certain characters are drawn. All of the negative characters being Jafar, Iago, and

the apple seller are all caricatures, who are drawn very tall, very large, or very small. Jafar is in

all red and looks evil. Meanwhile Jasmine, Aladdin, the Sultan, and Genie have Western body

profiles. It’s quite apparent that the drawings of the characters were for the audience to determine

who was good and who was bad. The red and blue coloring is inherently American, seeing as the

two colors are used primarily in their flag, in the colors for their two parties, and in Aladdin show

the difference between the Muslim world, the red, and the American/Western world, the blue. It

could also be said that red is indicative of heat and blue of water and the fact that Middle East

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has a plethora of one and desperately needs the other, is just another caricature of the Middle

East in the film. There are other indications that point to Aladdin being nothing more than a

political cartoon meant to turn the minds of the audience against the people of the Middle East. A

few would be the timing of the film, in which it came out as Desert Storm was happening, the

fright over the nuclear weapons that America thought Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait had, and the idea

that the Middle East were full of thugs who wanted nothing more than to take over the world.

One particularly damning piece of evidence against Disney, according to author Alan

Nadel in his journal article, “A Whole New (Disney) World Order, is the scene in which Jafar

hits his apex of evil. He becomes a dark energy and is surrounded by a very visible halo of an

atomic insignia. (Nadel 194).This seemingly propagated the ideas that if we allowed the world to

be overtaken by the Middle East a new world order would take over and we would have to

forever live in fear of a nuclear takeover. Another reading of this film is Disney’s support for

President Bush and the War, when his popularity was starting to dwindle. And the film doesn’t

just stop at race and politics either, they then try to propagate the idea that Jasmine must have a

man to take care of her, because her father, The Sultan, is just so worried she won’t be able to

survive. Through the whole film Jasmine keeps insisting on marrying for love, which is noble,

but her poor father tells her he hopes she never has a daughter so she doesn’t assert her

independence and dare to do anything but get married. Then Jasmine does find love and spends

the rest of the film trying to prove to Aladdin she is not a stuck up snob and that she is in fact

worthy of him, while he is trying to prove to her and her father he is worthy enough and can take

care of her. (Borthaiser 1-12). The whole film stinks to high heaven of nothing but Orientalism,

Sexism, Racism, and Classism. And people still went in masses to see the film and show it

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willingly to their children. As I stated before, is it any wonder our current relationship with the

Middle East is doing so well?

And because they were accused of being misogynistic to women and doubly so for

women of color, they of course did not stop there. They created films that feature strong female

leads in Mulan, The Princess and the Frog, and Pocahontas. And seemingly, it’s a great step

forward. Mulan is Asian and goes out to fight for her father who is injured and can’t anymore.

Tiana is a strong, hardworking African-American woman who is a waitress and dreams one day

of owning her own restaurant, and Pocahontas brings honor to her family by saving John Smith

and then she lives happily ever after with him.

And on the cover, these films do seem swell, then we look at them closer. Mulan is

basically a “bad female” for almost the entire film, because she doesn’t want to just get married,

and especially because she emasculated her father by going to war for him. And even while

performing as a man, she’s the worst male. She doesn’t fit in anywhere, and is actually quite

depressing to watch. But then, she miraculously becomes a woman again after being injured,

saves the entire kingdom and is a hero. However, she isn’t considered “good” until she goes back

home and does what she’s supposed to: be a homemaker. Then Chang arrives and “rescues” her

from being a dishonor to her family. What a great, positive message that sends out. “You can be

a hero, but only if you get married and be the good little woman we all know you secretly want

to be.” The blatant sexism in this film is quite possibly the most offensive in all the Disney films

I’ve ever seen. The worst part is that it’s cloaked in a message of being a hero, and being a

woman. This doesn’t even begin to touch the surface of how damaging this can be to those that

don’t identify with the gender they were born as, and what kind of message does this and every

Disney film send out? That you’re wrong for not identifying with the gender you were born as.

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Sarita McCoy Gregory states in “Disney’s Second Line: New Orleans, Racial

Masquerade, and the Reproduction of Whiteness in The Princess and the Frog,” that the film

uses second line attempts to reveal the humanity of blacks, while reasserting traditions of racial

hierarchy. While individualism and romantic engagement continue to exist as themes now

attached to representations of blackness, there is another project that Disney undertakes in this

film-maintaining its investment in whiteness-that warrants further investigation.” (Gregory 432).

In other words, Disney tries to show Tiana as a strong, amazing black woman, but the

film still relies on “the ideology of whiteness that sanitizes everyday lives of African-Americans

and normalizes whiteness.” (Gregory 433). In the film, Tiana is the protagonist and the main

character, but she does not get to be princess. No, that is saved for the white character of

Charlotte. But despite the fact that Charlotte gets to be the actual princess filmmakers try to

assert that Tiana is a black princess. So if she is a princess, why is she a waitress? Why is her

only redeeming feature going from poverty to riches? Why couldn’t we have seen a rich black

family with Tiana as the princess? The answer is that Disney needed to have her interact with the

white real estate brokers to “reinforce the moral code of white supremacy.” (Gregory 443). They

tell her that being outbid was a good thing because she was not from the right background. This

simply reinforces the idea that Tiana’s desire to own land is inappropriate, and especially for a

black woman. Disney tells the audience that there is a distinction between persons (being white)

and sub-persons (being black) and that black people are only wealthy by the benevolence of

white people, and therefore only human once they become wealthy. The filmmakers claim that

they never intend to “teach people about racism” (Gregory 447)., but they do, whether or not

they want to, because their own racist ideologies seep into the film and therefore into the minds

of those who watch it, and Disney’s racism is blatantly apparent in The Princess and the Frog.

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Tiana gets her happy ending, which is of course a guy, noticing a trend here in Disney films in

relation to women?

Then we have Pocahontas, a film about a Powhatan Indian girl who saves John Smith

and then falls in love with him and brings great honor to her people. The only problem with this

is that it’s not historically true, in any way, shape, or form. Pocahontas did exist, but she didn’t

save John Smith and she didn’t marry him. In fact, the Powhatan people find this movie and the

retelling of this story to be the most offensive thing they have ever heard. And the best part of

all? Disney filmmakers claim that they went out of their way to get Native American input. Of

course, they never actually acknowledge who they asked, but any Powhatan person can tell you,

it wasn’t them. Producer, Jim Pentecost on the film, “There’s not a lot of firsthand material, we

thought that since historians among themselves can’t agree, that you know, we had a certain

amount of a license to use what is known from the folklore to create this story.” (De la Cruz).

This quote in and of itself is quite laughable, because the claim that since historians disagree, it is

okay to simply rewrite history and say whatever you want about a person that actually did live,

and not only rewrite history, but write something so offensive to the people that Pocahontas

belonged to.

The fact that Pocahontas only brought honor to her people by saving a white man, that the real

Pocahontas didn’t even know, let alone marry, is what offends the majority of Native Americans

who have seen the film. The fact that Disney pulled nearly every stereotypical move in the book

when animating and writing the story, did not really help either. But the most appalling of all is

that the real story of Pocahontas is not a love story, it’s not a happy go lucky story that has a

happy ending, its tragedy. The real Pocahontas was captured and taken to England where she

was married off and shown off as a “civil savage”, because she too was colonized. Her people

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were raped, pillaged, and murdered from ruthless colonization, and Disney’s rendition of

Pocahontas is a mockery of Mataoka, the real Pocahontas and the Powhatan people. And this

film is being shown to Children as if it is such a good film, because it is historical and it has good

music and its “Disney”, never mind that it is offensive and racist to an entire group of people,

and that Pocahontas’s only redeeming feature is that she married a white man who she saved.

(Kutsuzawa 2-6).

Disney is brilliant. They’ve created films that everyone wants to see, because they are

pretty and nice and tell stories of love and overcoming obstacles, and meanwhile they can insert

subliminal messages and political, racist, and sexist ideologies throughout their films and have a

good laugh at the billions of susceptible people who go along with it. And that is why colonizing

of the mind is so dangerous. The fact that we watch these films and don’t think about the

implications of Tiana being told she has to rely on white people to be successful, that Pocahontas

is only a hero when she saves a white man, that Mulan is only good when she’s a woman who’s

in love, and that Aladdin is a no good, dirty thief who can’t be trusted, shows that we are implicit

in our colonization.

We do it to ourselves, because even if we can see the messages, we often don’t care,

because we buy into them, after all we are white, we are western, we are American, we aren’t the

Orientals being made fools of. Orientalism is okay, since you know, we are not from there. The

ambivalence of our society has led to us being more colonized than those we are watching being

colonized by Disney. Disney colonizes Orientals on film, and while we are watching it and

agreeing with it, Disney is colonizing us and making trillions of dollars off our ambivalence and

our propensity to want to be better than everyone else, to want to feel special, unique, and great.

In Deconstructing Disney, authors Byrne and McQuillan claim that Disney knows what it is

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doing, that we, the subaltern do not speak because we are ambivalent, and Disney simply

continues to colonize our minds because we let them. They make the argument that it’s good

and right to deconstruct Disney, to cast them in the same light they cast us and Orientals, that

Disney is not held exempt from being ridiculed and mocked, and that if more people actually did

speak up about it, we’d have a fighting chance. (Byrne and McQuillan 1-2) The fact remains

though that we are a lazy people, that we like being fed anything sugarcoated, even if it is a giant

pile of excrement, we’d still eat it, because it tastes so sweet and we like sweet things.

When it comes to colonization, we are always being colonized, and for the most part our

colonization is our own fault, because we do not know how to speak up, or because we simply do

not want to. So, yes, we can talk about post colonialism, and how great it is to be out of that era,

but we will never be post-colonial completely, because every day our minds are being colonized

by Disney, by random television commercials, by politicians trying to tell us what to believe, by

television shows telling us hot girls in bikinis are where it’s at, by rappers telling us we need cars

to be happy, and by literally anything we ever read, hear, or see. We don’t have a choice in being

indoctrinated or in being colonized, but we do have a choice in what we listen to, and maybe if

we were a little more careful in listening to the right things, we wouldn’t be so willing to eat

whatever candy coated piece of shit we come across.

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Works Cited

Aladdin. Prod. Ron Clements. Perf. Robin Williams and Scott Wenger. The Walt Disney

Corporation, 1992. DVD.

Bernstein, Matthew, and Gaylyn Studlar. Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film. New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997. Print.

Borthaiser, Nora. "A Whole New World- Rereading Disney Animations of the Early 1990s."

Americana- E-Journal of American Studies In Hungary IV.1 (2008). Print.

Byrne, Eleanor, and Martin McQuillan. Deconstructing Disney. London: Pluto, 1999. Print.

De Kock, Leon. "An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak." A Review of International

English Literature 23.3 (1992): 29-46. Print.

Degli-Esposti, Cristina. Postmodernism in the Cinema. New York: Berghahn, 1998. Print.

Dela Cruz Yip, Arielle. "Colonial Colours of the Wind." WordPress. 15 Apr. 2012. Web. 2 May

2012.

Dittmer, Jason. Popular Culture, Geopolitics, and Identity. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

2010. Print.

Inception. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, and Joseph Gordon

Levitt. Warner Bros.2010. DVD.

Khair, Tabish. "Can the Subaltern Shout (and Smash?)." World Literature Written in English

38.2 (2000): 7-16. Print.

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Kutsuzawa, Kiyomi. "Disney's Pocahontas: Reproduction of Gender, Orientalism, and the

Strategic Construction of Racial Harmony in the Disney Empire." Asian Journal of

Women's Studies 6.4 (2000): 1-39. Print.

Maggio, J. ""Can the Subaltern Be Heard?": Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak." Alternatives 32 (2007): 419-43. Print.

McCoy Gregory, Sarita. "Disney's Second Line: New Orleans, Racial Masquerade, and the

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