Disney Construction Of The Arab Space And Cultural Identity

Abstract

It has often been remarked that forging representations is a form of naturalizing the external world to our perceptions. This form of naturalization is the manner in which distant and exotic spaces, peoples and cultures are made to seem more familiar and more natural to viewers or readers. As case in point, some cartoons about Arabs have functioned to translate strange-looking Arab locations by ordering them according to the codes of Orientalist composition and spatial recession. This has allowed these locations to be apprehended by the cartoon viewers as abstract spaces liable to total conversion and imaginative transformation. In fact, the notion of abstract space is of great importance given that it explains how that lived space and the means of perceiving it through vision are intimately connected by representation. Abstract space is an order into which human activities are placed, but it is ultimately a conception of space that shifts practices. It constitutes a way of perceiving the world that changes what the world is and what happens there. As such, the Disney world transforms territory, making it fit the already existing old traditions of the eighteen and nineteen centuries by caricaturing the Middle East, for instance, as full of desolate deserts, corrupt palaces and heathen Arabs. Narratively linking Arabs with the desert proves a start for more sweeping misperceptions of the Arab cultural diversity and complexity. Worse yet, Disney tends to present both Muslims and Arabs as one people representing the same dangerous culture and populating the same deserts. Culturally looking at this kind of reductionism would prove that Disney not only gives Arabs a Muslim identity but also gives Muslims an Arab identity. Certainly many parts of the Arab world do feature desert landscapes. However, any ho mogeneous marriage of people, identity and space in terms of the connotations of “desert” would ignore both physical and cultural varieties of many Arab countries. Still an inevitable truth is the idea that the Arabland and the people living there, be they Muslims or Christians, are framed in an abstract geography based upon debased terms of exoticism, violence, barbarism, misogyny and excessive lust, to mention but a few. This way, the abstraction of the Arabland, lives, practices and peoples finds a visual analog in the representation of a “dematerialized landscape.” Such type of landscape is an exotic sitting full of black beards, palm trees, oases, hooked noses, belly dancers, harem maidens and automatic weapons, to mention but a few. To substantiate its contentions, this paper shall base its data analysis on the Disney movie of Aladdin. Through this movie, this paper shall argue about the idea that Disney constructs the Arabs’ cultural identity– synonymous to a variety of odious and demonized traits – based on special implications. Thus Arabs are defined according to their relation to their inhabited denuded, empty geographies. Worse yet, geography, in these Disney cartoons, is used metaphorically to take on a personified quality that translates into attitudes toward that part of the world. For example, when the Arabland means the “desert,” this is not just a mere landscape but a state of mind. That is to say, given that the desert and jungle connote emptiness, danger and cultural “backwardness,” the hostility of these environments often translates into attitudes about the people who live there. Indeed, such pejorative association between geography and cultural identity shapes the mise-en-scene of much of Disney’s negative portrayal of Arabs. ملخص تعـرض هـذه الدراسـة مـن خـال تحليلهـا للصـور المتحركـة التـي تنتجهـا اسـتيودوهات ديـزني الأمريكيـة التمثـات السـائدة عـن العـالم العـربي و الـرق الأوسـط بالـذات و التـي تسـتند غـى التصـور الـذي بنــاه الاســتراق الغــربي عــن الــرق بصفــة عامــة و الــرق العــربي بصفـة خاصـة. مركزيـن اهتامنـا عـى فيلـم “عـاء الديـن” المقتبـس مـن قصـص ألـف ليليـة و ليلـة نـود أن نفـكك الصـورة القاتمـة التـي