CHAPTER SEVEN: Disney and the Ethnic Other: A Semiotic Analysis of American

Identity
Author(s): MANISHA SHARMA
Source: Counterpoints , 2016, Vol. 477, Teaching with Disney (2016), pp. 95-107
Published by: Peter Lang AG

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45157189

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 Disney and the Ethnic
Other

A Semiotic Analysis of American

Identity

MANISHA SHARMA

While many think of art education as the teaching of studio skills and art his-
tory to K-12 students, a contemporary art education paradigm encompasses visual
culture and straddles disciplinary striations of cultural and media studies, mate-
rial culture studies, and (visual) literacy studies (Freedman, 2003; Tavin, 2010).
Critical art education focuses on big ideas such as identity, representation, truth/
myth, and spectatorship to enable students to become more aware of their own
agency in the construction of culture and gain tools to make more informed deci-
sions in their engagements with the ideological positions represented in visual
culture (Desai ôc Darts, 2013; Tavin, 2005). Understanding and unpacking how
viewers come to make assumptions about the beliefs and mores of ethnic cultures,
using the tools of critical semiotic analyses of Disney, enable learners to examine
how stereotypes and misconceptions arise through the uncritical consumption of
contemporary visual storytelling. The popularity and status that Disney enjoys in
global popular culture translate into teaching opportunities at multiple levels of
formal and informal education, including K-12, higher education, and lifelong
learning settings.
In this chapter, I describe how Disney emerged as a favored lens to examine the
construction of ethnic identity in a general education class on writing about visual
culture at a large Midwestern university, even though I had not explicitly asked
students to engage with this specific topic. I explore how those students decon-
structed American culture and identity - specifically, ethnic identity - through an
analysis of Disney films as cultural artifacts. First, I provide an overview of how

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96 I MANISHA SHARMA

the consumption of Disney s visual culture is linked to constructions of American-

ized cultures and ethnic identity. Next, I contextualize the study of Disney in my
teaching of/as critical art education practice. Having set this context, I share my
students' deconstructions of Disney, identifying three themes that emerged from
their semiotic analyses of how ethnic characters are othered; through their accents,
through their portrayal as enacting savage behaviors, and through their representa-
tions as lacking visible characteristics that reflect ethnic identity. Finally, I describe
how students' ideas about ethnic identity were deeply entwined with ideas of
nationality, immigration, and racial identity and discuss how the themes emerging
from their analyses led to understandings of American identity as defined through
viewing "ethnic" as "other."

DISNEY AND ETHNIC IDENTITY

Disney is a diversified enterprise comprising media networks, parks and resorts,

studio entertainment, consumer products, and interactive media. It includes a pan-
theon of cultural figures and stories that have become embedded in American
culture and appropriated elsewhere, leading to pan-Americanized cultures that are
"giocai" (Appadurai, 1996; Hall, 1997) - that is, that are concerned with issues and
objects that reflect, and are affected by, local and global concerns. Giroux (2004)
writes about how Disney fantasy worlds that promote and popularize idealized
ways of life become the images "on which America constructs itself" (p. 55). One
American ideal constructed through Disney texts is the notion of a "magic king-
dom," which is positioned as the happiest place on earth as long as its delightful
innocence and moral values remain protected and secure within its borders - a
"closed and total category" (p. 54). A number of scholars, including Giroux and
Pollock (2010), and Sammond (2005), have problematized and unpacked the
influence of Disney on the formation of American society and culture, focusing
on how Disney enables children as consumers and commercializes education in
public and private spaces (Budd 8c Kirsch, 2005). Bell, Haas, and Sells (1995),
Cheu (2013), and Davis (2014) bring more clarity to how Disney constructs and
portrays socio-cultural ideologies of gender, race, and ethnicity. Scholars and art-
ists including Bernardi (2008), Bret (n.d), Brode (2005), and Jhappan and Stasi-
ulis (2005) have highlighted how engagement with Disney culture helps shape
self-identity, as participants learn a sense of other, or not-me , via specific signifiers
within Disney's portrayal of racial and ethnic stereotypes. Adding to this body of
work, I ask, who in our culture have we learned, through internalizing Disney's
narratives, to position as heroes, villains, sidekicks, and comic relief? How does our
engagement with these representations help shape or affect our real-life attitudes
and assumptions about ethnicity and nationality?

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 DISNEY AND THE ETHNIC OTHER | 97

In this chapter, I address these questions by sharing how university students

constructed their own self-identities through a recognition of ethnic identity as
"other" as they deconstructed Disney s visual culture. The class in which these
analyses took place fulfilled requirements for undergraduate students across many
disciplines to hone their academic writing skills, as well as to gain tools to examine
and discuss issues of cultural diversity. Students researched and reflected upon
their own consumption of culture via visual artifacts in their personal, professional,
and cultural lives to build researched personal narrative essays. In doing so, the
class critically investigated how personal, national, and global identities of individ-
uals and societies are social constructions inherited through the institutions such
as family and education, rather than serendipitous or due to genetics or evolution.
Students conducted this investigation through examining images of their
lived worlds as visual text, using semiotic analysis methods such as denotation and
connotation and the identification of signs, symbols, and icons. In Charles Peirce s
system of semiotic analysis (as described by Hoopes, 1991), denotation refers to
the identification of visible aspects of an image, connotation refers to the inferred
meanings derived from denotations, and signs, symbols, and icons are categories
or types of meaning making. Through semiotic analysis, students examined what
they recognized as comprising visual representations of "being American" at a per-
sonal, local, national, and global level. Through student writing and in-class dis-
cussions, students deconstructed associated aspects of American identity such as
race, ethnicity, class, and originary nationalities of Americas residents in reference
to their own lived experiences; they also reflected on the power dynamics of ethnic
identity constructions in America in the context of their personal experiences of
engaging with Disney as visual artifacts. In what follows, all quotations are from
unpublished student papers and class discussions taught over three years.

ACCENTED OTHERS: LANGUAGE AS A CHARACTER TRAIT

Pinpointing denotations of how they identified central and secondary characters

in Disney films, several students noted that main and positive characters typically
have noticeably American accents. Sula, for instance, wrote about Aladdin (Clem-
ents ScMusker, 1992) that "It is remarkable that Aladdin and Jasmine, who look
white, have American accents, while Jafar, who should be of the same ethnicity,
looks darker and has a British accent. This is weird because they are all supposed
to be Arab . . . and should speak the same way. I know its a fantasy film but thats
an odd choice for the filmmakers to have made." Other students reiterated this
point, citing the difference between Pocahontas's accent and that of other Native
Americans in the film. Discussing Disney films as products of, and fuel for, under-
standing American culture, students revealed that they were often confused about

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98 I MANISHA SHARMA

the differences between race and ethnicity and thus often used these two terms
interchangeably. The tone and language of students* speaking and writing revealed
that they very much assumed whiteness to be the norm of being American. Thus
whiteness, and an assimilated accent of the sort adopted by national news anchors,
was the standard against which otherness was read in terms of recognizing some-
one's ethnicity.
For example, Jake pointed out in a class discussion that "It seems that the less
important or serious the character, the more ethnic' and broken, and away from
mainstream American the accent gets," while Chelsea noted in her research paper
that the sidekicks of the heroes and villains tended to have rather marked accents:

Reviewing beloved Disney characters from my childhood, I notice with dismay that there
is a pattern. The more comical and bumbling characters can always be identified to have a
strong accent that is a signifier of race or ethnicity. Clownish Mushu from Mulan (Bancroft
8c Cook, 1998) who should, if anything, sound Chinese, but sounds black; Goofy Sebastian
from Little Mermaid (Clements 8c Musker, 1989) is Jamaican, the sly hyenas from The
Jungle Book (Disney 8c Reitherman, 1967) and Lion King (Disney 8c Minkoff, 1994) are
Hispanic, and fussy Timon, also from Lion Kingf is clearly Jewish. While I appreciate that
not everyone sounds white and American, it seems unfair that no Disney hero or heroine
has had an ethnic accent, at least as far as I could find. The closest anyone comes to this is
Mike Wozowski, the anxious Jewish character from Monsters Inc. (Docter, Silverman, 8c

Unkrich, 2001). Although I think hes a sidekick, he's almost a protagonist. Also, I am not
sure whether he's actually supposed to represent Jewish ethnicity, or New Yorkers as a tribe!

Kaiya, an international freshman student said that watching the Disney Channel
made her cringe because its overt stereotypes of characters in the name of humor
seemed racist. She wrote:

So many characters that are not white are such caricatures. Ravi from Jessie (Ryan 8c List,
2011) has a fake Indian accent which is awful because the actor who plays Ravi doesn't talk
like that. Such portrayals make the inclusion of characters like Ravi seem like tokens of
multiculturalism, rather than honest representations of American culture. Watching this
show, I feel like apologizing to and for both Indians and Americans.

Students like Chelsea, Jake, Kaiya, and Sula effectively used the tools of semiotic
analysis to explain their recognition of accented language as a marker of ethnic
culture. This enabled them to review and critique problematic representations of
multiculturalism and to raise vibrant discussions in classes about the nature of
ethnic and racial identity.
Chelsea's remark that "... not everyone sounds white and American," reveals
how ethnicity is associated with non-whiteness, as well as with accents that do
not follow the linguistic norms of what used to be known as General American
(Labov, Ash, & Böberg, 2008); this remark furthermore positions being ethnic as
somehow less American. While students who were born and reared in the United

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 DISNEY AND THE ETHNIC OTHER | 99

States tended not to see these differences as problematic, students whose fami-
lies were recent immigrants, acknowledged feeling othered by being perceived as
"more ethnic," and were more vocal about the impact of representations such as
those described above. Based on these student voices, exaggerated representations
in Disney subscribe to and build upon these assumptions, often combining them
to reify this into cultural beliefs about how accents signify presence or lack of
American identity in terms of ethnicity.

SAVAGERY AS A SIGNIFIER OF ETHNIC AS OTHER

Several students recognized how their engagements with Disney, especially

the animated films, led them to identify the good guys and main characters as
American or more characteristic of being American. No matter that the story was
set in another part of the world, or in a fantasy land with racially diverse charac-
ters or even anthropomorphic characters; the heroes of the story-the hopeful, the
adventurous, the righteous, the eventually victorious characters-were synonymous
with an American ideal. Blake wrote,

I am amazed by how cleverly Disney switches our perspective as viewers to that of the
nice guys. Reflecting on my own gaze as viewer, I realize that I identify the nice guys as
American, and from this point of view I notice that in Disney, the nice guys might be char-
acters of any race or ethnicity but if they aren't desirable elements of society, they become
significantly more foreign, and ethnic.

In his paper, Blake noted that as a child he always watched Peter Pan (Disney et
al., 1953) from the perspective of Peter, identifying Peter, as well as himself, as
American, while he positioned Wendy, the Native Americans and, the pirates, as
foreign. He remarked on his unconscious assumption that Native Americans are
non-Americans, explaining that because of the way in which they were portrayed
in the film as an "other" culture, they became an ethnic group that was as strange
and exotic to him as pirates.
Other students, including two international students, made note of internal-
izing the hero/heroine as American, even when, as children, they pictured them-
selves in the roles. Concurrently, they saw savagery and exoticness as a marker of
ethnic otherness in the products of Disney studios and entertainment; this dark
savagery stands in contrast to the bright "can-do" attitude that is at the center of
Disney s American identity. Examples of this dark savagery trope cited by students
included vicious Jafar in Aladdin, as well as the merchant s song, also in Aladdin ,
that narrates the barbarian nature of the place "where they cut off your nose if you
don't like their face"; duplicitous S her Khan in The Jungle Book , and the nefarious
villain of Phineas and Ferb (Povenmire, 2007), Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, who is
from a fictional Eastern European country.

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100 I MANISHA SHARMA

In reflecting upon how he understood which characters depicted American

identity in Disney, Blake tried to explain that while early characters like Dumbo
and Mickey Mouse are easy to spot as racist because of the contexts of American
racial history, more recent ethnic characters portrayed as dark and savage are
accepted with little fuss because they are clearly "not us." According to Blake, cer-
tain problematic characters are accepted by mainstream viewers because they are so
far from any possibility of self-identification as being American or about America,
they are easy to dismiss as fantasy or humor. Therefore, in mainstream rhetoric
they are not recognized or labeled as racist. He clarifies that, "Disney sets up dis-
tinctly non- American characters who will stand out as foreign and alien in every
version of good-old-wholesome America. . . . They have ruthlessly set up ethnic
characters who do not confirm to their [Disney's] American ideal as untrustworthy
. . . thats a pretty scary idea to accept as entertainment and good fun."
This reading is evidence of Disney s success in promoting the rhetoric of
American-ness as a land of the free and home of the brave - a narrative recogniz-
able in fantasy settings, and internalized by both Americans and those who are not
American - to create a giocai cultural instinct that perceives goodness, Tightness,
and being on the winning side as American, and everything else as foreign. That
Disney leads us to conflate this subconscious idea with overt ethnic characteristics
of physicality (color, facial features, accents, and clothing), confirms the need to
continue teaching criticality using Disney.

"I HAVE NO ETHNIC IDENTITY"

The previous two themes contain indications that many students conflate white-
ness with a lack of ethnicity. "I'm just white," they insist. "I'm not ethnic." They
most commonly support this claim by demonstrating their lack of an accent (even
though I insisted that everyone has an accent) and by stating that neither they
nor their families observe ancestral rituals. Through further discussion and gene-
alogical research, students would investigate and reveal their ethnic heritages, and
Caucasian students were often struck by the idea that they too might be under-
stood as "being ethnic." The class then investigated how rhetoric in popular cul-
ture supports the idea that whiteness equals a lack of ethnicity. Reflecting on their
personal lives, students mused that the lack of a dominant culture s rituals led
them to assume that they did not have an ethnic affiliation. Normalized Chris-
tian rituals were understood as mainstream and hence not interpreted as ethnic.
Based on their descriptions, whiteness, a "normal" American accent, lack of overt
ritualistic religious practice, and normative Western dress signified the absence of
ethnicity, which was equated with Americanness. Students observed that Disney
consistently contributes to the idea that ethnicity, skin color, and linguistic accents

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 DISNEY AND THE ETHNIC OTHER | 101

are directly linked. They argued that a majority of positive protagonists had no
ethnicity and claimed that these characters were "just more American" even if they
obviously weren't American, as in the case of John Smith of Pocahontas (Disney,
Gabriel, 8c Goldberg, 1995) who was supposed to be English, or the protagonists,
Dory and Marlin, from Finding Nemo (Stanton 8cUnkrich, 2003), which is set in
Australia.

During class discussions on their own ethnic identities, students repeat-

edly voiced the idea that unless they had inherited hyphenated identities such
as Italian- American, Chinese-American, African-American, Indian-American,
or American-Indian, they did not identify as "being ethnic." In a discussion on
hyphenated national identity, I asked students to visually portray such hyphen-
ated identities, and then just American identity. Assured of a safe space, students
portrayed hyphenated identities with ethnic signifiers such as food, dress, and
physical characteristics. However, when asked to portray "American," they por-
trayed non-ethnic symbols like McDonalds and the American flag. It appeared
that most students thought that an unhyphenated American identity was not eth-
nic and (usually) white. In one particularly heated discussion, a student declared,
"I know I'm going to sound racist, but basically white people are not ethnic,"
to which another rebutted, "Irish-Americans are white and they re ethnic." To
this, the first speaker promptly replied, "Only if you're a leprechaun and in Luck
of the Irish?
In follow-up discussions about ethnically hyphenated identity in America,
students explored what it means to conflate whiteness with non-ethnicity, and
as a corollary, what it means to "other" people even in the presence of difference.
For example, they discussed how Aladdin growing whiter through the duration
of the Disney film might signify his receding ethnicity as he develops from a
rather rascally vagabond into a hero who we can admire and trust and explored
whether stereotypical "hick" characters like Mater in Cars (Disney, Lasseter, 8c
Ranft, 2006) become less lovable for their drollery when they are read as portray-
ing Appalachian culture as an ethnic type. Finally, one student ruminated that
after the blatant racism of Si and Am in Lady and the Tramp (Disney et al., 1955),
Disney has never featured any other overtly Thai characters; rather, such ethnic
specificities have dwindled into general Asian racial types or become altogether
absent. This student mused about whether this is a step forward or backward in
globalized visual culture, questioning whether the incorporation of overt ethnic
and racial types to accommodate multiculturalism is necessarily a good thing. The
student further wondered if the removal of such stereotypes means that Amer-
icans have truly gone beyond caricatured misrepresentations of non-normative
cultures and asked whether it is productive or unproductive to portray characters
in ways that lead us to think about constructions of "us" and "them" in our visual
cultures.

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102 I MANISHA SHARMA

AMERICAN IDENTITY AND IMPLICATIONS OF IDENTIFYING

"ETHNIC" AS "OTHER"

These investigations into Disney s representations of ethnicity reveal, first, that

to these students, the "ethnic" is easily recognizable as a culture of "otherness,"
where otherness is understood in terms of being non-white, or overtly foreign in
appearance, accent, or behavior. While stereotypes in early Disney productions
such as the crows in Dumbo (Disney et al., 1941), or the Siamese cats in Lady
and the Tramp are easily recognizable as troublesome by being overtly distasteful
caricatures that call to mind Americas racist past, more recent depictions, as in
Aladdin , Lion King , Jessie , or Pocahontas need closer scrutiny because they set
up ideas of generic feel-good protagonists who must bear, battle, or be amused
by less powerful, or just lesser characters, just as the superpower America must
battle, support, tolerate, or mentor the rest of the world. In Disney, acting as the
representation of a noble, "magic kingdom" America, the ethnic others can be
funny, silly, well-meaning, dangerous, untrustworthy, or just plain awkward, but
they rarely fit the mold of the central character - the easily recognizable "Amer-
ican" protagonist. The exceptions reported by students included Lilo and her
sister, who are read as "ethnic Hawaiian," in Lilo and Stitch (DeBlois 6c Sanders,
2002), and Russell, who is Asian American, from Pixar's Up (Docter 8c Peterson,
2009).
For these students, it appears that the issue is not only that ethnic minorities
are stereotyped, but also that only certain ethnicities are visible or represented
at all. This is an important issue given that The Walt Disney Company is so
vast and holds such sway over how American culture is imagined at home and
throughout the world. As my student, Hussain, wrote, "Disney needs to realize
that America and the world is a lot more than black, white, and pan-Asian.
Pixar has helped with Upy while Brave (Andrews, Chapman, 8c Purcell, 2012)
and Ratatouille (Bird 8c Pinkava, 2007) are clearly about non- American con-
texts, which is a more honest and promising direction to go toward." In order
to be truly global and respectful of its influence and embrace an inclusive
American culture, Disney will need to stop rendering cultures invisible or in any
way lesser.
Also emerging from student discourse addressing Disneys use of accents,
clothing, and other signifiers of identity, is the suggestion that in order to be
recognized as truly American, one needs to give up identification with aspects
of a hyphenated ethnic identity. For instance, according to several students, one
cannot be fully American as long as one continues to identify with an "other"
culture that connotes loyalty to another nations culture-such as Asian-American
or Indian-American, or African-American. While this reads as somewhat absurd

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 DISNEY AND THE ETHNIC OTHER | 103

and casually racist, since the same students did not necessarily feel this way about
Italian- Americans, Irish- Americans, or indeed, any European hyphenations, their
views were supported by illustrations from representations in Disney. Validating
existing research (Crum, 2010; Jhappan Sc Stasiulis, 2005) students provided
examples of Disney where villains, crafty characters, and buffoons tend to have
British, Islamic, and Latino/Hispanic characteristics, exotic characters tend to be
Eastern European or Romani, and haughtiness is conveyed as French or British.
They illustrated that a sense of belonging, as seen in shows on Disney XD, is
conveyed by distinctly "American" accents, clothing, and behaviors. On shows like
the i Suite Life of Zack and Cody (Cross 6c Höge, 2010) Lab Rats (Kallis, 2005), and
Pair of Kings (Moore 6c Peterson, 2012), the racial and ethnic diversities of main
characters are dissolved into a fun- and adventure-filled melting pot where no
harm ever comes from what would, in real life, be generally considered pretty bad
behavior on the part of a child. For example, Yung explained on a class discussion
board that "These shows make you think (that) you can be Asian-American, or
American. Whether or not you are a brat or urban princess, or a science nerd like
in Lab Rats , it can be less awkward if you see yourself in there, as just American
(emphasis added); its less painful for a kid if there is not the added stereotype of
identifying as - oh yes, that s me, the Asian-American." To this, another student,
Jared, responded that Disney XD was getting it right - that to be American, peo-
ple needed to give up their obsessions with the past. "You dont see a lot of white
people hanging on to their German or English ancestry - like, I dont hyphenate
as German or English though my family has both. Get over it, and show you're
proud to be American." While Jared displays white privilege, Yungs writing indi-
cates that visual culture giants like Disney could do a better job in conveying the
dilemmas of American youth without reducing them to a fantasy-driven common
denominator of all American-ness.
Finally, student analyses of the cuteness of obviously ethnic or foreign char-
acters revealed that they find such representations othering - that is, those rep-
resentations can be embarrassing, alienating, or condescending. While students
found the acquisition of Pixar and Marvel to have brought more balance to Dis-
ney's portrayals of diversity (as in Up , Brave , WalTE [Stanton, 2008], and the The
Avengers [Whedon, 2012]), Disney Channels such as XD have a long way to go in
producing critical shows that depict ethnic characters in unbiased ways or portray
them as falling within the normative collection of character templates. As Jared
shared in his culminating paper for the class, "It seems that Disney movies are
examined a lot in classes like this, but no one seems to be looking at Disney TV,
which is what kids nowadays are watching." Considering the popularity of Disney
Channel shows among children and pre-teens, we might further examine how the
ideologies of identity and ethnicity expressed through those texts have shaped the
perceptions of older students.

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104 I MANISHA SHARMA

DISNEY AND CRITICAL ART EDUCATION

In an era of globalization, the power of nation-states as controlling social imag-

inarles is on the decline. In retaliation, these nation-states regress to a "defensive
and highly dangerous form of national identity (Hall, 1997, p. 178)," which may
develop in two directions - global and local. As they impact each other recipro-
cally, these two directions become giocai (Appadurai, 1996; Hall, 1997). The dan-
ger in selling a mythical, singular national identity presented as a unified vision is
that this singular identity diffuses difference and ignores the impacts of difference
felt by those who are deemed non-normative or non-mainstream. In other words,
fostering such singular identities leads to false articulations of the sociocultural
and historical experiences of those who are identified as inside or outside of a
mainstream culture but who inhabit and are affected by the politics and policies
of nation-states. Such singular articulations of national identity, when translated
into understandings of self and other, can result in the creation and maintenance
of imbalances of power among peoples in the form of discrimination, invisibility,
misunderstanding, and dis-identification or alienation. The reflections presented
above, which revealed how ethnic otherness can be read in Disney s construction
of a singular, normative American identity, are examples of how othering happens
in visual culture.

In all their variation, the discussions examined here reflect a microcosm of

the slipperiness and struggles of defining racial and ethnic identity in the United
States, and of the global pervasiveness of American visual culture that Disney
creates in and perpetuates through kinder-culture and beyond. Students' reflec-
tions on ethnicity as part of American identity point to national and global
questions of social justice. Their discussions and writings addressed difference
and raised queries about how representative images affect people in real ways
as they process and communicate ideas about personal and national identity. As
Tavin and Anderson (2003) note, "as critical art educators, we should investigate
how corporations produce knowledge about the world, distribute and regulate
information, help construct identity, and promote consumption in visual culture"
(p. 34). Because Disney is so beloved, familiar, and globally recognized, it can be
difficult to engage students in questioning their comfortable and unproblema-
tized engagements with their own values and belief systems and to encourage
them to consider points of view other than their own in order to understand and
challenge their own problematic constructions of identity. Yet, because the ethnic
fantasies constructed by Disney continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and
cultural misconceptions, they must "be interrogated for the futures they envision,
the values they promote, and the forms of identification they offer" (Giroux 6c
Pollock, 2010, p. 7).

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 DISNEY AND THE ETHNIC OTHER | 105

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. How do current shows on the Disney XD channel construct normative rep-

resentations of a generic American-ness, through their depictions of ethnic
characters?

2. What is your understanding of what, or who, can claim an ethnic identity?

Explain, using as an example, one or more of Disney s visual culture artifacts.
3. If you were to redesign a key Disney character to look, talk, or behave as a
different ethnicity without losing their defining characteristics, how would you
represent them differently? How might these changes affect the characters
status and recognizability as an American cultural artifact?

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