Narrative Art as a Colonizing Process: An Analysis of the ...
Colonizing of the Mind1
Transcript of Colonizing of the Mind1
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
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