![]() ![]() ![]() Within the opening song the lyrics describe the town to be “where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” (Khalifa), essentially describing the people of these cultural backgrounds to be barbaric and uncivil. ![]() Agrabah, although a fictional town for the movie, is based off Middle Eastern, Islamic, and Asian aspects and cultural identities. With the 1992 animated Disney movie Aladdin, Mariam Khalifa from Sail, an online magazine based in the United Arab Emirates, discusses prevalent issues that the movie details. Most of the historical productions of Aladdin were based on exoticized Orients with English fashion and language. This continued into the following century where a British pantomime in 1935 had actors in yellowface in their production. In 1880, Aladdin was depicted to have been of Chinese descent and soon the story was turned into a burlesque play in which the actors are placed in yellowface although appearing to be in a setting that was culturally European at the time (Vox). Afterward, post-2003, more documentary based films were made focusing on Iraq and Baghdad on wars with political and military engagement. Early films based on Baghdad, the capital of Iraq and one of the largest cities in the Arab world, were idealized as fantasy with genies and magic carpets, similar to that of Aladdin, and were first produced in the early 1920s until the 1958 Iraqi coup d’état when less representation was shown until Disney’s 1992 Aladdin and 2002 Live from Baghdad (Scurry 15). “A major event in the history of the West was the discovery of the East.”īaghdad, as described in Samuel Scurry’s work on Orientalism in American Cinema, was one of the “earliest ‘Oriental’ cities to serve as the setting for mainstream American films, and has long since remained a portal into a land of fantasy and…adventure” (Scurry 15). Essentially, the origin of the movie stems from a colonialist view of Asia and the Middle East during the 18th century, filled with exoticism and xenophobia. From there, the French writer, Antoine Galland, was believed to have added the story of Aladdin and claimed: “to have heard it firsthand from a Syrian storyteller” (Vox). Jorge Luis Burges states in the Georgia Review, “a major event in the history of the West was the discovery of the East” (Burges 564), and in 1704 Europe had published their own version of the tales. This research blog will focus on the portrayal of Aladdin and the Middle-East throughout the last century in film and media, from the early 1920s films of Baghdad to the 2019 Aladdin live-action movie detailing orientalism and stereotypes of Middle-Easterners throughout variations of the film over time and learn how Middle-Easterners feel towards these portrayals. The tales are believed to first be told in India before traveling to Persia and Asia Minor and having finally been written down in Cairo, in Arabic during the 15th century (Borges 566). Aladdin, a classic Disney film was not always just that its origin is from the stories from the Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales. Orientalism has been prevalent in western film and media since the early 20th century. ![]()
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