PRAJNA PARASHER
Much of the discourse about Disney’s Peter Pan has focused on the eternal boy child (now well inflected by Michael Jackson though the film predates him by a couple of decades). Barrie’s imaginative leap into the mind of housebound Edwardian boyhoods becomes in Disney’s hands a map of already decaying white imperialist concepts masquerading as playful fantasies. Foppish Captain Hook, bumbling pirate crew, and a leering alligator people Neverland with images born of standard British childhood literature visualized through the American burlesque tradition of stagey exaggeration. It is in the Disney Indian camp, though, that the rupture of charming fun into racial hostility can be most obviously noted. Is a perception of wildness an antidote for the constraints of life in a Victorian nursery?
To begin to investigate how Disney’s Indians came to be depicted as they are, it’s necessary to trace their history in American popular culture. Going back at least to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, entertainers known as “Show Indians” participated in circus-like demonstrations of the usual dramas—stagecoach robbery, kidnapping, war dances—what was already understood through penny dreadful novels1 as the narrative of European/American Indian interactions. Presented in places where large audiences could support the considerable expense, these circus productions were what we would now recognize as a market commodity; actors displaced from their cultural traditions took on work imitating themselves, depicting the image of the frontier as urban people in both America and Europe already understood it.2
While the studio could make use of these images without any concern over copyright, the same is not true of the title text. There were years of negotiation with the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London, which had inherited the royalties to the novel; part of buying the rights included front-loading the film with an acknowledgement of thanks.3 It’s useful to compare Barrie’s text with the Disney one. There are fewer rewrites than one might expect; the primary difference is in weight of the various aspects of Neverland. In the original, Indians played a less significant role—one more of Peter’s adventures but not so central as Hook. They disappear from the narrative after the first half of the book. When America of 1950 looks through the lens of London 1910, however, the camera might well find itself focused on an anonymous but identifiable malevolent enemy whose most identifiable characteristic is recognizable racialized difference. As McCarthyism badgered Hollywood into the reiteration of banalities and away from anything issue-driven,4 the Indians would rise out of the underbrush like Gus from Birth of a Nation. While the studio was canny enough not to use Barrie’s language, “the Piccaninny tribe, and not to be confused with the softer hearted Delawares or the Hurons,”5 it reveals itself willing to make use of racialized cliché through filmic conventions. The hand-drawn chart or rutter,6 so significant in the rise of the actual colonial experience, lives on in adventure stories which rewrite it into docility.
Maps are two-dimensional and have been constructed as accurate, fixed and objectively presented copies of a “real” world, at the same time they are socially constructed, ideologically engineered, and as a paradigm of colonial discourse, maps permit the national to “imagine” itself. In Peter Pan, maps do not reiterate a seemingly objective representation. Instead they represent a position of power that evokes a cartographer, giving Peter the means to transform land/maps according to his needs. With Peter we embark on an imaginary expedition in which maps and landscapes are mercurial instead of fixed, changing appearances according to where the Darling children, Peter, Tiger Lily and Tinker travel. Through this journey the audience becomes an imaginary cartographer who interacts through representation.
Disney’s use of the map has multiple functions in transforming Barrie’s Edwardian story to the needs of another decade. It replaces with a familiar iconography the collusive literary tone of the original. Barrie’s coy asides are necessarily transformed into visualities and filmic readings as familiar to the film audiences of the 1950s as direct address to the novel’s reader would have been to the young readers of the 1900s. The map chalked on John Darling’s boiled shirt, not part of the original text, depends, like so much of the slapstick in the nursery scenes, on a physical comedy tradition sourced in American vaudeville, minstrelsy, and British working class music halls. To write the map into this tradition is to compound it with another theatrical convention familiar since Shakespeare, that of the distant tropical island. We know, as audience, that this remove will be to a place of license, magic, sexual ambiguity, low vulgar comedy and ultimate happy endings. Our position as audience/tourist is enhanced by recognition that we will also be voyeurs, forever wiser and more ahead of the game than the players. Disney studios’ particular insertion into this trajectory included the need to maintain the apparent playful quality whilst overriding the lewd, cruel and jingoistic aspects by screening them, much as Barrie did previously, through a childish imagination. Both apologize for their colonial positioning by dismissing it as foolery and thus, in the tradition of the theater fool, make their most important statements in riddling reversals.
In the Disney film, the map first appears on the patriarch’s body. When we see it next it is a series of transitional frames that allow us to visualize that we are leaving London for someplace else. Such coding was common, even expected, in films with “exotic” locations (Casablanca [1942], King Kong [1933], The African Queen [1951]). All of them depend on a schoolboy confidence that representation of the unknown bestows ownership. The pathetic fallacy obscured in dramatic or adventure genres is fore-grounded in fantasy, but the function doesn’t change. “X” not only marks the spot, it confirms that the spot exists. Such mapping is reiterated when Tink, who is without voice but not without expression, uses it to trace a line to Peter’s hideout amongst the Indians. In a polyglot visual language (melodrama’s oily seducer and betrayed maiden mixed up with the bad girl’s betrayal of her wholesome lover) Tink dips her feather-tipped mules in ink and catwalks over the map with a series of backward glances worthy of Betty Grable or maybe even Sisi of Habsburg. Her highly sexualized figure writes its own doom, as we well know even before Hook shuts her up in a lantern. Disney, cautious about the changes of sexual language, calls her a pixie and not a fairy, but in her Vegas gear, she is fairly equivalent to the Barrie original “exquisitely gowned in a skeleton leaf, cut low and square, through which her figure could be seen to the best advantage, She was slightly inclined to be embonpoint.”7 It is the Hollywood of the fifties.8 She is female, selfish, willful, vapid and most damning of all, common; if she takes up a tool of power, she will carelessly destroy the Indians through her preoccupation with Peter. In a turn of the plot she shares with the tragic mulatto9 and other female characters of color, she will have to offer her own life to correct this terrible error.
Depictions of female sexuality have always been fraught in English/American tradition but the coding changed with the era. So it is Tiger Lily who, while portrayed as sexually available in Barrie, becomes in Disney the epitome of the exoticized maiden/vamp. Almost as voiceless as Tinker Bell, a kettle mender whose name recalls Irish gypsies, the Indian Princess’s gestural language is limited to an aloof, stubborn (but fetching) stare and a set of crossed arms. All she can say is “no,” until we get to the dance scene, where it is suddenly “yes, yes, yes.”
Within a postcolonial context we can recognize maps as the act of looking as well as guides to actual travel. Looking and exploring constantly fuel each other. Lines, borders and boundaries, are cached on the landscape, and within this swaying between looking and going maps become more fluid and acquire independent cartographical qualities separate from any reflection of political or geographical realities.10 Mapping implies a ‘shifting ground’ that is subject to change, erasure, and new reworkings.11 Mapped onto the animated body of Tiger Lily are some rudimentary markers of the American Indian, braided hair, headband, leather garments; she is equally represented though period expectations the Hollywood ingénue. She will take central place, backed by a male chorus, in the musical interlude. This cartography comes up as expected in “Why is the Red Man Red?” Some complaint has already been voiced by those who oppose stereotypical representation about this song, which affirms that he’s red from a constant pursuit of red women.12 It would be hard for the studio in 2010 to wriggle out from under this pre-civil rights era gaff particularly since the braves are indeed drawn in darker tones than Lily, and that’s not the whole of it. The braves are not only bigger and darker than the maiden, but they are to a man clumsy, grotesque and with faces which have prominent noses and mouths but also no eyes at all. Does this elision of the return gaze suggest that they accept what has been written upon them? In trying to imagine what they were thinking in creating these characters, one of the ideas which occurs to this observer is that they were cognizant of the racist tradition into which they were drawing: these bodies, with different costuming, could easily be those of happy field hands or bush cannibals leaping around their fire. The google-eyed look contributing to black buck can be re-drawn as eyeless, producing instead the inscrutable slanty-eyed tribal.13 That it also shifts the characters into a more completely passive role betrays an unconscious reflexivity visible in other parts of the sequence. Tiger Lily’s dance maintains the toe-to-heel step we associate with Indian dance, and she bends forward as if in obeisance to something, but she is otherwise mapped into Western filmic codes. She dances alone, eventually with Peter, standing on a stump and with a fluid eroticized body meant to display her personal appeal, not her function as part of the group. The scene ends, as anyone might predict, with Lily and Peter rubbing noses, an “Indian Kiss.” Language conventions (“how,” “ugh,” “red man”) not only further characterize the Indians as buffoons but also make their way into the film’s songs, further trivializing the silencing they mask.14
Peter in his war bonnet recalls the popular notion that significant whites such as Presidents were given this headdress as an honorific, a sign of inclusion into the tribe. It is, of course, another piece of show Indian behavior since the specific meaning of the bonnet, the materials in it and the rank of who might wear one, would have different meaning, if any, to those of the culture to which it belongs. In a non-reflexive playing out of the white man’s hubris that he is welcomed and cherished by those he has conquered, the story line affirms that the Indians are grateful to Peter because he rescued Lily. In order to keep the patriarchal implications clear, Wendy is sidelined by being called “squaw” and asked to carry firewood. The wood business is original with Disney, but Barrie does say that the London miss does not like being called “squaw” recognizing it as insulting in the way that “brave” is not.
The book is Edwardian, the tracery of a slipping empire appearing as quaint charm in the ascendant America of the fifties. Barrie’s revealingly money-preoccupied John Darling becomes transformed by Disney into one more in the procession of inept Hollywood fathers protected by competent, loving wives. In an era caught in the illusion of standardized family relations, it was a general paradigm that did not depend on external experience. In those early years of broadcast television, children played imitative games of house, and of cowboys and Indians. Cap guns, imitation Stetsons and other cowboy gear were significantly more popular toys than moccasins and bows and arrows. A friend who remembers this era says, “The girls and the little kids always had to be Indians.” Jungian shadow space: America’s own imperialism, already intuited if not understood by its children, underwent regular rehearsal.15
Maps spur imagination, discovery, travel, conquest, and migration. Scientific in their plan, maps reinscribe, enclose and create hierarchies of space for the acquisition, management and reinforcement of power articulated through practices of recording, labeling, naming and classifying. Disney’s map of Neverland, apparently sourced in the “pirate map,” easily found on a mid-century cereal box or luncheonette placemat, discovers itself to be real, the plat book of burgeoning Disneylands: corporate reality, virtual, national, global. A century ago it felt perfectly reasonable, and possible, that Cody could bring the Wild West to London. Now we go to it; winning football players in the lead, we can fly—Orlando the stopover—to a programmed, idealized environment which can be both adventurous and safe, permanently happy and never unpredictable. It is a map our children can read before they know their way to school. That Michael Jackson should not only identify this film as his favorite, but also name his home in its honor, might well have predicted another un- or sub-conscious reflexivity that only breaks the surface like the crocodile’s tail; Jackson’s brushes with fame, with gossip, with the law, and his early death by drugs have at this point mapped onto lived experience what can happen when your GPS is programmed “second to the right and straight on to morning.” His story is the painful evidence of the dangers in inhabiting a commodity construction: a 50 year-old black millionaire died as a starveling white crone.
Disney’s genius in the transformation of the story is in the technological use of Neverland as a dead space; not only are plot deaths reversible, but it all happens within childish imagination, the anxiety of an impossible nationalism coped with by a magical place with nebulous borders. Significantly, Peter Pan’s popularity does not stop with America’s shores. It had and still has an international following. Peter’s heroics defuse not only the sexual minefield but the racial one as well, and more significantly, sexualized racial lines where a preadolescent white boy (he still has his baby teeth) can outwit any threat, historical or geographical. Barrie, responding to the end of the great colonial period, dressed the lost (British–born if rough) boys in animal skins as a masquerade which they eventually escape but felt no need to give the grunting braves individual names, voices or futures.
The diverse, decimated communities that provided the material for this erasure became homogenized into Pidgin English, plains Indian teepees, and more than anything else, the substitution of the terror and horror of a warring exploitive past with a jokey, incompetent present: Jim Crow Indians. The animated version of Peter Pan incorporates a standing theatrical tradition; its own particular inflection is the lack of any shading or irony and, in the America of the 1950s, oblivion masquerading as innocence, something the upcoming ’60s were about to dispel. The figures—braves, squaw, chief, princess—are immediately recognizable as Disney which in itself displays a caricature history that was at inception specifically racist (Little Black Sambo, et al.) and then transformed into animals (Goofy, Bugs, Porky) as the animal bodies upon which embedded stereotypes were subsequently written.16 The illusions and elisions of 1953 were so ingenuous that much of this history is entirely evident. Princess Tiger Lily’s name is English; whatever this flower is called in American Indian languages, it wouldn’t reference an animal from other continents. Conventional uses of the exotic abound. When the chief is dancing, at one point his steps change from the campfire cadences we recognize to something between an Irish jig (vaudeville) and a Cossack squat-dance.... Cossacks were also a feature of William Cody’s traveling shows. Concomitantly with the American Indians themselves taking jobs as show Indians as a form of acknowledgement that their own cultures were undergoing erasure, popular culture—majority culture—had to create an Indian to fill the emptied space and forestall any acknowledgement of living on stolen ground. It has often been said that slavery is the founding trauma of the nation; it may not be the only one. If we see this as a black and white issue, and certainly it was, Indians were dubbed “red” men but what that meant was that they were not white, and the white man’s entitlements while not overtly questioned, benefited from, nay, required, the continuous propping up available through minimizing the humanity of any Other.17
A brief loop backward. While Disney Studios had their own traditions to work out of, they share more than might be expected with Peter Pan’s original creator, Barrie. Buffalo Bill’s company appeared in London in 1887 for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee held in celebration of the semi-centennial of her reign. Held in Earl’s Court, London, it was housed in a huge arena with a grandstand of 20,000 seating capacity. Her Majesty, making her first public appearance since Prince Albert’s death twenty years previous, not only approved of the show but promoted it. Considering it an event of “educational superexcellence” she endorsed a performance for the entertainment of 3000 royal representatives assembled from every part of the empire. By royal fiat, Bill’s Indians were as safely locked into the English psyche as the Kohinoor into the Tower. If we try to decode the emotional underpinnings of the Darling family in London, why a focus on Indians? What do they have to do with not growing up? If in America the various incarnations of the pop culture black man (Uncle Tom, Jim Crow, Zip Coon) were created to defuse changing mainstream fears in changing social milieus, could the “savage” be seen as the antithesis of English boyhood? Barrie’s sexual anxieties are more covert than those revealed in the American minstrel tradition, doubly coded in childhood derring-do and oblique classical allusion. What Disney does with this is to elide subtlety (Pan’s garments are more of theater Robin Hood than satyr) and to pretend—perhaps it’s not a pretense—that we all see Indians as projections of our own personal losses of the chance to pillage and shout, not as a national loss of honor. The shift was as smooth as Yankee Doodle transforming into a patriotic song. Because the visual coding of blacks was already well-established in the Disney canon, it was inevitable that these stereotypes would be transferred to the Indian encampment in Neverland. The lost boys live underground and are dressed as animals. If the English children are reduced to animal forms, then hierarchy demands that the Indians be something less; they make their first appearance as marauding trees. Sign and signifier are one thing; more than at home in the wilderness, Indians are the land they inhabit. Even when out of their disguises, they look much alike, an ugly and monotonous parade of the big-nose Indian on the buffalo nickel.18 Racial stereotyping requires not only a disempowering gaze but a unifying one as well. “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” or one reduced to unthreatening caricature. The hand-drawn figures are spookily similar to the cheap, angular cartoons of later digital productions.
It’s possible to think of Disney’s Peter Pan as a kind of innocence, not the “wholesome family entertainment” umbrella which has sheltered the studio’s fatuous bigotry for so many years, but the innocence of an era not yet engaging in a critical look at the psychic damage made visible through popular culture. Walt Disney’s own repeated attempts to make a film based on Hiawatha suggests that such a consideration never came up.19
The same thing cannot be said for more recent Disney show Indians, those in Brother Bear (2003). Set “respectfully” amongst the Inuit, the characters are generic enough to be Eskimos and with a nod toward the preoccupations of our era (multiculturalism, shamanism, totems, matriarchy, transformative power of love) move through a story line that struggles between Cartoon Network and religious docudrama. Unsettlingly like the thank you to the hospital in Peter Pan, but far more obfuscated, at its onset this film thanks unnamed experts and consults. Acknowledging real ownership is here transformed into self-created authority. As in Peter Pan the exploitation is of the image, not anything itself. The half century between the two products reveals, however, both an increase in the crassness with which “magic” is produced and a refusal to engage with the cultural assumptions that allow the ethnic Other to be conflated with an animal. Joseph Campbell, whose scholarship on the hero’s quest helped to inspire Star Wars, would recognize the same framing in Brother Bear but here made campy and didactic. Not played for laughs like the Indians of Peter Pan, the primary characters, brothers Kenai, Denahi and Sitka, are undergoing manhood ordeals; rather than demonstrating competency in adult responsibility, though, what they do is rush around in life-risking adventures over rough terrain, ice-age retro Marvel heroes. A vague location in the distant past, glib truisms, adroit animation, and careful avoidance of any hot-button topics (no tarted-up maidens for instance) suggest that all the “creative” work had first to be vetted by a roomful of company lawyers. In response to a general increase of cultural sensitivity and discourses surrounding political correctness, Disney’s 21st century peek outside Burbank is no less patronizing, only more bland. Very much like the worst of contemporary school history books, it is a philosophy of avoidance rather than engagement. If you can’t find a non-controversial way to transform Pocahontas into Lady Rebecca, leave them both out. What is most revealing about Brother Bear is the way Disney is still locked into their original dodge from overt racism, that of pasting racial stereotypes onto anthropomorphized animals. This story line not only allows Kenai to become a bear, but finds that he prefers such a life, violating the superhero tradition where Clark Kent always in the end comes back to his recognizable human self.20 It is hard to imagine that such liberties would have been taken with any contemporary urban character. Even Spiderman and Cat Woman revert to comforting office clothes after they have righted the world. To present the American Indian man as transferable (mercurial) to a bear is to equalize their value, not in the hokey transformative way the new ageist story asserts but as commoditized units well below white men in the Great Chain of Being. But there is more here....
Brother Bear’s take on Ice Age man depends on the givens of commodity stereotype. The characters wear skins, have slanty eyes, carry stone weapons and write on cave walls. In a nod toward feminism, the wise character is a kind old female, but we are never allowed to forget this is a constructed world—moose, mammoths and bears are all in the same time and place, personified and cooperative with men. The animal figures have more individual personality than the humans, who are so similar we identify one from another mostly by haircut. The men’s monotony recalls the indistinguishable braves of Neverland. They reveal commodity fetishism not only by their lack of individual personality but also with dialogue co-opted from New Age preoccupations and pasted onto an imagined hunter-gatherer society based on archeological evidence which offers very little such detail. Placing it in the distant past is no more effective than placing it on an imaginary island. While it may prevent any racial slurs from being actionable, it is bald racism nonetheless. Only in a playful film like Harvey (1950) would a contemporary white man be turned into an animal. Kenai’s transformation into his totem happens in the radioactive half-life of a mainstream visual history going back at least to Edward S. Curtis’ manipulated images of living American Indians costumed according to his idea of how they should look for the avid consumers of specular Otherness.21 Such leather and feather Indians lived, as Bert Williams said about being a stage Negro, a very inconvenient life, providing simulacra for which there was indeed an original, but one known only to the actor in his private life and unavailable to, unwanted by, the paying audience.22 Disney fits comfortably into this tradition. The tragedy we are now living in, concrete as part of Disneyland as an imaginary map which has created its own corporate real with tentacles into the most private parts of our consumerist lives, is yet another incarnation of Manifest Destiny, so alluring and so often repeated that it can and does overwrite lived experience.
The paradigm from which Disney studio Indians are drawn betrays its Orientalist perspective subtly as well as overtly. Kenai’s name, innocuous in written letters, comes over somewhat differently as experienced in the film. Heard, not seen, it is pronounced “keen eye,” directly evocative of “Hawkeye,” James Fenimore Cooper’s character and one of the earlier entertainment Indians sourced in the literary imagination of an urban writer using American material to embroider a novel based in the European tradition. That Cooper’s works may have at last been removed from most curricula and that film versions of Last of the Mohicans have not been particularly successful does not have much impact on the persistence of Tontoesque characterizations pretending to acknowledge the presence of pre–Columbian civilizations.
In like ways, the map is present in Brother Bear, re-coded but not transformed. The transitional device here is cave-wall painting. Far more like those discovered in France than those in the Grand Canyon, it does not even pretend to any cultural specificity but uses familiar images rather like the pidgin English of non-white players in adventure films; the only thing it tells us about those who use it is that they are less than ourselves because they are not fluent in our language. The bear paw print, portrayed as produced by a man and presented in elaborate computer animation, is the mark of B’rer Fox in a terrifying new disguise. We are supposed to accept him as family.
Of course he’s not really scary because we all know we’re kidding. As with our lost past, the whole relationship of contemporary urban Americans with wild life is fraught with historical misunderstanding. American Indians, who both knew bears and depended on them, treated the animal with honor and respect. Pioneers, recognizing a dangerous but useful resource, of necessity maintained the respect even when their religious text obviated the honor. Now that our real relationship is through animation and the mall, it is more familiar to think of bears as adorable toys than as real creatures once at home in the spaces we now inhabit. In this way, outside of historical time and common sense, Brother Bear is a screen upon which the outline of erasure can play. The insult is in the way that lived trauma, orphanhood for instance, can be presented as repairable by theatrical magic.
American Indians as part of the consumerist menu are particularly available when we use those about whom we have no evidentiary trace. The mystery of the Ice Age allows us to pretend there never were any cigar store Indians or forced migrations or Carlisle training schools. We can print around this pretense of vacuum, Smokey paws on the wall, whatever history is convenient for this moment. One of the reasons this production was so mildly successful may well be the transparency of the conceptual base. As a film it falls flat. Peter Pan’s century of interest depends on Barrie’s ability to have intuited the unspeakable of his time. Brother Bear is locked into the acceptable of its time. Like the historical pageants springing up as part of historical sites and community celebrations, it does not pretend to be anything more than a series of signifiers allowing us to use the “past” to celebrate ourselves. That such productions are not successful as theater is unimportant. Mirror writing does not allow for the multiple reflections that serious psychic reflection drama requires. Multicultural discourse is a kind of therapeutic discourse, designed to work out the wrinkles of its creator; it can’t be decentered without evaporating.
On his way to embodying Pan, Michael Jackson evoked another man/animal transformative tradition in Thriller. The extraordinary popularity of this video suggests that he did indeed tap into the same kind of subterranean racial and emotional material that Barrie discovered. The werewolf tradition is another European construct interestingly conflating the wild with the sexual. Originating in the need to cope with wilderness still surrounding evolving town and city culture, it becomes something else after crossing the Atlantic. In America this discourse always includes elements of race. Thriller’s (1983) backdating itself into the fifties acknowledges the black and white B movies it is sourced in as a series of complex filmic jokes. The primary consumers for this product would have been anticipated as teenagers and young adults. At this point in his career, Jackson was still visibly African American so the incorporation of cultural fears about Black males needed no elaboration and could even be played for laughs at the same moment it was most serious. It also appeared when such material was open for discussion, activism and social change.23 The recognition factor available here allows for viewer involvement in a way that pandering to “we are the world” iterations cannot.
What such things are useful for is to remind ourselves of the security of our position. The Indian is as safely dead as the werewolf and the bear. We claim ownership of his trace the same way we see his vacated places only as geographical points on a map. While we don’t yet have shops where children can “Build an Indian” and watch while a machine opens his back and stuffs him with fluff, we can appropriate his image in similar fashion. The action at Wounded Knee was in 1973 yet we are still comfortable co-opting Indian tracery and Indian words as if they were part of the public domain, the imaginary.
1. Cheap American and British popular fiction of the 19th Century.
2. For more on how an entertainment spectacle is taken for “the real thing,” see Joy Kaysson’s book Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. For cinematic representation of American Indians see Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffen’s America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies.
3. See the opening credit sequence in Walt Disney’s Peter Pan.
4. Of course there were notable exceptions like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).
5. J.M. Barrie, p. 56
6. Rutters are hand-drawn charts or maps produced from the late 16th century to mid–19th century. These maps provided sailing directions and routes between destinations.
7. J.M. Barrie, p. 25
8. For an interesting thread of connection between Walt Disney, Marilyn Monroe and Tinker Bell see Douglas Brode’s Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, pp. 132–133.
9. Young woman of color or a woman of biracial heritage, who is inserted into the narrative in order to be the obvious victim. In American literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, the tragic mullato is a stereotypical character who can “pass” for white until her biracial status is revealed. Her story always ends in tragedy.
10. I have adopted De Certeau’s correlation between maps, touring and looking.
11. For a discussion of the map as a “shifting ground” see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. “The map,” they write, “is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, re-worked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on the wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation” (p. 12).
12. See American Indian activist websites and also University of California, Berkeley’s library catalogue of books and articles on American Indian representation in the movies—“The Movies, Race and Ethnicity: Native Americans.”
13. See Douglas Brode’s discussion of caricatured representation in Peter Pan, pp. 25–26.
14. An interested person could compare this sequence of the Indians celebrating their mistaken identities with the way Uncle Remus does his, though finding a copy of Song of the South will require a more “scholarly” investigation than finding Peter Pan, which is still in general circulation.
15. Judith Butler’s conception of the gendered and racialized body as constructed in terms of a corporeal style is useful to my argument here.
16. See Paul Wells’ discussion in The Animated Bestiary of how animation uses animals to play out the conception of human animals.
17. For an understanding of the racial stereotype I have drawn on the work of Homi Bhabha who has called attention to the commodified, exploited and exoticized colored body from a psychoanalytic perspective.
18. Minted from 1913 to 1938 and withdrawn in the 1950s and 1960s.
19. See Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment, pp. 24–25.
20. For the meaning and cultural context of Superman through the changing mediums of comic books, television shows and film see Tom De Haven’s Our Hero: Superman on Earth.
21. In 1900, Edward S. Curtis documented American Indian cultures on hand-pulled photogravures.
22. In Marlon Riggs’ Ethnic Notions, choreographer Leni Sloan discusses the origins of blackface minstrels and the complexities of this form when black performers were allowed on the minstrel stage. In the film, Sloan pays homage to Bert Williams, the greatest and most successful African American blackface comedian of the Vaudeville era.
23. See Kobena Mercer’s analysis of the racial and sexual ambiguity of Michael Jackson in Thriller (1983) in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies.
Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Benshoff, Harry M., and Griffen, Sean. America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004.
Brode, Douglas. Multiculturism and the Mouse: Race and Sex in Disney Entertainment. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.
De Certeau, M. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
De Haven, Tom. Our Hero: Superman on Earth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980.
Kasson, Joy S. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.
Kilpatrick, Jacquelyn. Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Reddin, Paul. Wild West Shows. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Rutherford, Jonathan. Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997.