The Roc’s egg as vanishing mediator in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp from text to film

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I trace the absent narrative of the Roc’s Egg in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp to the film adaptation. Disney, in particular, omits the narrative and by omitting, changes the inner logic of the text. The 1992 animated film and the 2019 live adaptation introduce a power relationship that shifts from the text’s structural power into agential power through its genre ideology of Americanisation. In this shift, there is a vanishing element that allows the change and that is the Roc’s egg whose meaning is power limitation. I argue that the roc’s egg in the text functions, in Jameson and Žižek’s lens, as a vanishing mediator that though is absent in the films still finds its meaning subsumed in them. In this way, the crux of the argument is to diagnose such Americanisation through limitation.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to firstly thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments that improved the piece a lot. He is grateful to Dorota Filipczak (University of Łódź) and colleagues for meticulously commenting on a previous edition of this work. He would like ultimately to dedicate this to her in memoriam of her passing during the revision of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book (eBooks@Adelaide, University of Adelaide South Australia. 2016), 4.

² Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Genres, ideologies, genre ideologies and narrative transformation’, Middle Eastern Literatures vol. 7, no. 2 (2004), 126.

³ Ibid., 128.

⁴ Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Whose story is it? Sindbad the sailor in literature and film’, Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 7, no. 2 (2004), 133–47.

⁵ Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Metamorphoses of Scheherazade in Literature and Film’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies vol. 66 no. 3 (2003), 402.

⁶ Ouyang, ‘Genres’, 128.

⁷ See Masakazu Higuchi and Jack Olesker, dirs. Per. Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Cam Clarke, and Candi Milo. Aladdin. Golden Films. American Film Investment Corporation, 1992. Irwin says that the typical iconographic registers in the Nights include ‘the Roc’s egg, harem girls, scimitars, genies’ etc., but this does not tell us that it is referring to Aladdin in particular. As we will see later, there is also a Roc’s Egg in Sinbad and that one, I claim, is more famous. Moreover, the roc’s egg in Aladdin was simply talked about but not seen in contrast to Sinbad’s story. So I doubt that the Roc’s egg is referring to Aladdin, as it did not register to me immediately.

⁸ Robert Irwin, ‘A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies’, Middle Eastern Literatures, vol. 7, no. 2 (2004), 223–3.

⁹ Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Sinbad’, 141.

¹⁰ Robert Irwin, ‘A Thousand and One Nights at the Movies’, 223.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² I thank the first reviewer for recommending Wen-chin Ouyang and Geert Jan van Gelder (eds.), New Perspectives on Arabian Nights (Routledge, 2005).

¹³ Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Sinbad’, 141.

¹⁴ Ibid., 142.

¹⁵ Ibid., 143.

¹⁶ I thank the second reviewer for pointing this out.

¹⁷ Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Genres’, 126.

¹⁸ Hasain Haddawy, trans. The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 9 [Digital copy].

¹⁹ The names Shahrazad and Shariyar, rather than Scheherazade and Shahryar, are consistent with the names I am using with Haddawy’s translation, which Paulo Horta uses as well. See Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Harvard University Press, 2019).

²⁰ Muhsin al-Musawi, The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures. Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 53.

²¹ Husain Haddawy, trans., The Arabian Nights II, Sinbad & Other Popular Stories (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), introduction.

²² Wen-Chin Ouyang, ‘Metamorphoses’, 403.

²³ Hasain Haddawy, trans. The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 13 [Digital copy].

²⁴ Hasain Haddawy, trans. The Arabian Nights, 19 [Digital copy].

²⁵ Haddawy’s text deviates from other translators. According to him, the translations of Edward Lane (1939–1941), Richard Burton (1885–1886), and N.J. Dawood (1973), followed a liberal format from their Arab literary predecessors. Dawood is ‘serviceable and plain’, Burton is ‘flamboyant’, and Lane ‘censoring the details.’ See Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights II, 6–15.

²⁶ Muhsin al-Musawi, The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures. Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 260.

²⁷ Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights II, 9.

²⁸ The other term for this is Djinn, Demon, or Jinn.

²⁹ Katherine Bullock & Steven Zhou, ‘Entertainment or blackface? Decoding Orientalism in a post-9/11 era: Audience views on Aladdin’, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 39, no. 5 (2017), 5.

³⁰ Abderrahmene Bourenane, ‘Authenticity and discourses in Aladdin (1992)’, Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research 13, no. 2 (2020), 235–50.

³¹ Julia Theyssen, ‘A whole new world’?—A comparative analysis of Middle Eastern representation in Aladdin 1992 and Aladdin 2019 (Thesis, Universiteit Leiden, 2020).

³² Donna Silaban, An Analysis of Moral Values in Guy Ritchie’s Movie ‘Aladdin Movie 2019’ Based on Disney’s Aladdin (Thesis, Universitas Muhammadiyah Palembang, 2020).

³³ Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. Penguin Modern Classics, 2003, 166.

³⁴ Husain, Haddawy, The Arabian Nights II, 192.

³⁵ Husain, Haddawy, The Arabian Nights II, 192–3.

³⁶ Kahambing J. G. (2021). Vanishing mediators in public health during COVID-19. Journal of public health (Oxford, England), fdab301. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab301

³⁷ Michael Cooperson, ‘The Monstrous Births of “Aladdin”,’ In The Arabian Nights Reader, ed. Ulrich Marzolph (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006), 265–86.

³⁸ Ibid., 271.

³⁹ Jan Gresil Kahambing, ‘Theorizing Mamanuan Diaspora: from Vanishing Mediator to Performative Indigeneity’, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 11, no. 2 (2019), 7.

⁴⁰ Edward Said, Orientalism, 3.

⁴¹ Tugrul Keskin, ‘An Introduction: The Sociology of Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism (Theories and Praxis),’ In Middle East Studies After September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony and Academia, ed. Tugrul Keskin (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 6.

⁴² Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, ‘A Genealogy of Orientalism in Afghanistan: The Colonial Image Lineage,’ In Middle East Studies After September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony and Academia, ed. Tugrul Keskin (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 50–1.

⁴³ Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, 51.

⁴⁴ Marwan Kraidy, Intertextual Manoeuvres Around The Subaltern. In Postmodernism in the Cinema, ed. Cristina Degli-Esposti (Berghahn Books, 1998), 45.

⁴⁵ Henry Giroux, ‘When you Wish upon a Star it Makes a Difference who you Are: Children’s Culture and the Wonderful World of Disney’, International Journal of Educational Reform 4, no. 1 (1995), 79.

⁴⁶ Kevin Shortsleeve, ‘The Wonderful World of the Depression: Disney, Despotism, and the 1930s. Or, Why Disney Scares Us, The Lion and the Unicorn 28, no. 1 (2004), 26.

⁴⁷ Lee Artz, ‘The righteousness of self-centred royals: The world according to Disney animation’, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 18, no. 1 (2004), 116–46.

⁴⁸ Robert Irwin, ‘The Real Discourses of Orientalism,’ In After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-Appropriations, ed. Francois Pouillion and Jean-Claude Vatin (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2015), 18–30.

⁴⁹ Muhsin al-Musawi, The Arabian Nights in Contemporary World Cultures. Global Commodification, Translation, and the Culture Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 253.

⁵⁰ Yuriko Yamanaka, Tetsuo Nishio, eds., The Arabian Nights and Orientalism. Perspectives from East and West (London and New York: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2006), viii; xv.

⁵¹ Jan Gresil Kahambing, ‘Developing the Vanishing Mediator as Theoretical Framework: Synthesis and Application’, The Journal of International Social Research 12, no. 64 (2019): 470–479.

⁵² Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative—Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, ed. F. Jameson (Duke University Press, 1993), 33.

⁵³ Keith Dowding, ‘Agency and Structure: Interpreting power relationships’, Journal of Power 1, no. 1 (2008), 21–36.

⁵⁴ Ulrich Marzolph, ‘The Man Who Made the Nights Immortal. The Tales of the Syrian Maronite Storyteller Ḥannā Diyāb’, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tales Studies 32, no. 1 (2018), 114–29.

⁵⁵ Eman Elturki and Suda Shaman, ‘Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp: How are Foreign Folktales Conveyed in Western Children’s Literature’, Arab World English Journal 4, no. 1 (2013), 130.

⁵⁶ While technically, Aladdin is not a myth, some elements of mythical reference are nonetheless representative. The idea of a ring with power has been as a mythic reference in DC’s Green Lantern. Looking into the origins of things characterise the myth along with supernatural elements. Miller’s distinction between a myth from the folktale is an important note here: “In the myth […] its redundancies, and its oscillations, the structure seems to be the more vital, necessary part of the message, with the personae changing as needed. The structure is repeated with different characters; the symbols appear in one repetition and not in another. In the folktale, the structure is simple and the personae are far more fixed to it: the structure is used only once in most cases and in only one way […] The small world of the folktale is a sphere of meaning that is circumscribed by the limited concerns of the ordinary people […] Myth—at least these myths—uses the same figures and symbolises them in some of the same ways, but myth makes them function as cosmic beings, creating and modifying the world itself, the great world, the world on which everything else—all the little worlds—depends. See Alan Miller, ‘Of Weavers and Birds: Structure and Symbol in Japanese Myth and Folktale’, History of Religions 26, no. 3 (1987), 327.

⁵⁷ John Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions (Boston. Project Gutenberg Etext of Myths and Myth-Makers, 1997).

⁵⁸ Don Ferguson, Disney’s Aladdin (USA: Longmeadow, 1992)

⁵⁹ Eman Elturki and Suda Shaman, ‘Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp: How are Foreign Folktales Conveyed in Western Children’s Literature’, 132.

⁶⁰ Jan Gresil Kahambing and Anne Dominique Duque, ‘Aladdin as an Immoral Ethicist in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp’, International Journal of Humanity Studies 3, no. 2, 84–95.

⁶¹ Guy Ritchie, dir. Perf. Will Smith, Mena Massoud, and Naomi Scott. Aladdin. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, 2019; Ron Clements and John Musker, dir. Perf. Scott Weinger, Robin Williams, and Linda Larkin. Aladdin. Walt Disney Pictures/Buena Vista Pictures, 1992.

⁶² Fatme Sharafeddine Hassan, ‘The Passion and the Magic: Distinctions of Arabic Folktales’, Al-Jadid 1, no. 2 (1995), http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/000/070/079/al-jadid/aljadid-magic.html (Accessed: June 12, 2020).

⁶³ Jennie MacDonald, ‘”Who Will Change New Lamps for Old Ones?”: Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in British and American Children’s Entertainment’, In All Things Arabia, eds. Ileana Baird and Hülya Yağcıoğlu (Brill, 2020), 89.

⁶⁴ Ulrich Marzolph, ‘Aladdin Almighty: Middle Eastern Magic in the Service of Western Consumer Culture’, The Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 525, 275–90.

⁶⁵ Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud, ‘English Travellers and the Arabian Nights.’ The Arabian Nights in English Literature. Ed. Peter Caracciolo (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1988), 95.

⁶⁶ Dan Fang, ‘Your Wish is My Command’ and Other Fictions: Reluctant Possessions in Richard Burton’s Aladdin (Diss. Vanderbilt University, 2011), 6.

⁶⁷ Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, The Aladdin Factor: How to Ask for What You Want and Get it (Penguin, 1995).

⁶⁸ I am referring to most scholars who present the princess almost without personality, which is true to the Arabic context that men are predestined to lead women in the manner that is tied to divine right. And the same goes for rulers. For the scholars, consult Andrew, Lang, Aladdin and the wonderful lamp (New York: The Viking Press, 1981), Eric Kimmel, The Tale of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp (New York: Holiday House,1992), Deborah Hautzig, Aladdin and the magic lamp (New York: Random House Books for Young Readers, 1993), Pat Stewart, Aladdin and the magic lamp (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), Kevin Eastman, Aladdin and the wonderful lamp (New Jersey: Troll Communications, 1996), Rosalind Kerven, Aladdin and other tales from the Arabian nights (Dorling Kindersley, 1998), and Philip Pullman, Aladdin and the enchanted lamp (New York: Levine Books). For an androgenic interpretation, refer to Ander Bergara, Josetxu Riviere, and Ritxar Bacete, Men, Equality, and New Masculinities (Vitoria-Gasteiz: EMAKUNDE—Basque Women’s Institute Manuel Iradier, 2010).

⁶⁹ This is evidenced in the versions of Lang, Hautzig, and Eastman.

⁷⁰ Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book, 4.

⁷¹ Dan Fang, ‘Your Wish is My Command’ and Other Fictions: Reluctant Possessions in Richard Burton’s Aladdin’, 21.

⁷² Ibid.

⁷³ Ibid., 5. See also Elaine Freedgood, ‘Introduction: Reading Things,’ The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1–29; Jeff Nunokawa, The Afterlife of Property: Domestic Security and the Victorian Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); John Plotz, ‘Introduction: The Global, the Local, and the Portable’, Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1–23.

⁷⁴ I am grateful to the first reviewer for this insight.

⁷⁵ Cassandra Stover, ‘Damsels and Heroines: The Conundrum of the Post-Feminist Disney Princess’, LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University 2, no. 1 (2013), 5.

⁷⁶ Gusti Ayu Istri Fridayanti, ‘The Representation of Feminist Ideology in the Characterizations of Princess Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin (2019) from the perspective of Liberal Feminism’, Thesis Ganesha University of Education.

⁷⁷ Rosalind Gill, Gender and the Media (USA: Polity, 2007), 73.

⁷⁸ Maureen Vieregge, ‘Femininity in Disney: Princess Jasmine as shown in Disney’s Aladdin’, Faculty of Humanities Bachelor’s Thesis, Utrecht University, 2020, 7–9.

⁷⁹ Jacqueline Layng, ‘The animated woman: The powerless beauty of Disney heroines from Snow White to Jasmine’, The American Journal of Semiotics 17, no. 3 (2007), 197–215.

⁸⁰ Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, Tim Whelan, Alexander Korda, Zoltan Korda, and William Cameron Menzies, dirs. Perf. John Justin, June Duprez, and Conrad Veidt. The Thief of Bagdad. Alexander Corda, 1940.

⁸¹ Husain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights II, 174.

⁸² Justin Marozzi, Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped Civilization: From Mecca to Dubai (New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2020), 77.

⁸³ Hasain Haddawy, trans. The Arabian Nights: Based on the Text of the Fourteenth-Century Syrian Manuscript, ed. Muhsin Mahdi (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008), 123 [Digital copy].

⁸⁴ Justin Marozzi, Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped Civilization: From Mecca to Dubai (New York and London: Pegasus Books, 2020), 76.

⁸⁵ I thank the first reviewer for emphasizing this insight, which resonates with the take of other modern scholars. For the scholars, see, for example, footnote 3, p. 18 of Tayeb El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Harun al-Rashid and the Narrative of the Abbasid Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

⁸⁶ Hasain Haddawy, The Arabian Nights, 7.

⁸⁷ Disney heroines often share the same dominant personalities like male heroes. See Azmi, N. J., Radzuwan Ab Rashid, Mairas Abd Rahman, and Z. Safawati Basirah, ‘Gender and speech in a Disney princess movie’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 5, no. 6 (2016): 235–9.

⁸⁸ Mundi Rahayu, ‘Identity Politics in Aladdin-From Arabian Nights to Disney Animated Film.’ 3rd Forum on Linguistics and Literature (FOLITER), Conference Universitas Islam Negeri Maulana Malik Ibrahim, Malang Indonesia, 2016.

⁸⁹ Mundi Rahayu, Irwan Abdullah, and Wening Udasmoro. ‘Aladdin’ from Arabian Nights to Disney: The Change of Discourse and Ideology’, LiNGUA 10, no. 1 (2015): 24–34.

⁹⁰ Raoul Walsh, dir. Perf. Douglas Fairbanks, Julanne Johnston, Snitz Edwards. The Thief of Bagdad. Douglas Fairbanks, 1924.

⁹¹ Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book, 7.

⁹² Ibid., 2.

⁹³ Peter Caracciolo, ed. The Arabian Nights in English Literature (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1988), xxiv-v, 13, 29, 35.

⁹⁴ See for example Oana Leventi-Perez, ‘Disney’s Portrayal of Nonhuman Animals in Animated Films Between 2000 and 2010’, Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011.

⁹⁵ Megan Condis, ‘She Was a Beautiful Girl and All of the Animals Loved Her: Race, the Disney Princesses, and their Animal Friends’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, no. 55 (2015), 47.

⁹⁶ Dan Fang, 2.

⁹⁷ Fatme Hassan, ‘The Passion and the Magic: Distinctions of Arabic Folktales’ as quoted in Eman Elturki and Suda Shaman, 123.

⁹⁸ Sabir Badalkhan, ‘The tale of “Aladdin and the magic lamp” in Balochi oral tradition’, Fabula 45, nos. 3–4 (2004): 217–8.

⁹⁹ Andrew Lang, The Blue Fairy Book, 9–10.

¹⁰⁰ Dan Fang, 21.

¹⁰¹ Robert Hampson, ‘The Genie out of the Bottle: Conrad, Wells and Joyce’, in The Arabian Nights in English Literature, ed. Peter Caracciolo (London: The Macmillan Press LTD, 1988), 222–3.

¹⁰² Phil Masters, Sinbad the Sailor (Myths and Legends) (Oxford, United Kingdom: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 26.

¹⁰³ Phil Masters, Sinbad the Sailor (Myths and Legends) (Oxford, United Kingdom: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 31.

¹⁰⁴ Atif Khalil, Sufism and Qur’ānic Ethics. In Routledge Handbook on Sufism, ed. Lloyd Ridgeon (London and New York: Routledge), 159–71.

¹⁰⁵ I thank the first reviewer for emphasizing this.

¹⁰⁶ Hatice Feriha Akpinarli and Pinar Arslan, ‘The Characteristics of Bird Motif and Döşemealti Carpets with Bird Motif’, Folklore Academy Journal 1, no. 3 (2018), 1–14.

¹⁰⁷ John Fiske, Myths and Myth-Makers: Old Tales and Superstitions.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid.

¹⁰⁹ Kadjis are ‘Demons’ in the Georgian tradition. See Elene Gogiashvili, ‘The Tale of Aladdin in Georgian Oral Tradition’, Folklore 129, no. 2 (2018): 151–52. Gogiashvili explains that, following from Rust’haveli 1912, lines 1225–27, the Kadjis or ‘men skilled in sorcery, exceeding cunning in the art, harmers of all men,’ are the most appropriate to replace the jinn.

¹¹⁰ Elene Gogiashvili, ‘The Tale of Aladdin in Georgian Oral Tradition’, 153.

¹¹¹ Alexandre Ghlonti, ed. Kartluri Zgaprebi da Legendebi [Georgian folktales and legends] (Tbilisi: Sabchota mtserali, 1948), 203.

¹¹² Jack David Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Routledge, 1991), 25.

¹¹³ Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). I thank the first reviewer for this insight.

¹¹⁴ Elene Gogiashvili, 157.

¹¹⁵ See Xavier Mínguez-López, ‘Folktales and other references in Toriyama’s Dragon Ball’, Animation 9, no. 1 (2014), 27–46. Mínguez-López states that the Dragon Ball plot used as its reference Cheng-en Wu’s book Journey to the West. Some reverberations of the plot also correspond to Japanese folklore.

¹¹⁶ John Gordon, ‘Getting Past No in Scylla and Charybdis’, James Joyce Quarterly 44, no. 3 (2007), 511.

¹¹⁷ Martin Quinn, ‘The Dickensian Presence in Heartbreak House’, The Shaw Review (1977), 120.

¹¹⁸ Adam Oehlenschläger, Aladdin, or, The wonderful lamp. A play (Gyldendal, Copenhagen, 1968), 262.

¹¹⁹ John Greenway, ‘Acoustic figures and the romantic soul of reason’, European Romantic Review 11, no. 2 (2000), 218.

¹²⁰ Nathaniel Hawthorne, A virtuoso’s collection (Priv. print. for the Friends of the Torch Press, 1949).

¹²¹ Francis O’Gorman, ‘Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach, and the Channel Railway’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 28, nos. 3–4 (2015), 178.

¹²² Sandra Lindon, Review of In the Garden of Unearthly Delights. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self by Marina Warner. Science Fiction Studies 30, no. 3 (2003), 538.

¹²³ Ulrich Marzolph, ‘The Tale of Aladdin in European Oral Tradition.’ Les Mille et une nuits et le récit oriental En Espagne et en Occident, eds. Aboubakr Chraibi and Carmen Ramirez (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009), 410.

¹²⁴ Ibid.

¹²⁵ Ibid.

¹²⁶ Frederic Jameson, ‘The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber’, New German Critique, no. 1 (1973): 52–89; see also Frederic Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory Volume 2: The Syntax of History (London, Routledge, 1988).

¹²⁷ Jan Gresil Kahambing, ‘Developing the Vanishing Mediator as Theoretical Framework: Synthesis and Application’, 470–9.

¹²⁸ Benjamin Arditi, ‘Insurgencies Don’t Have a Plan—They Are the Plan’, The Promise and Perils of Populism, ed. Carlos De la Torre (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

¹²⁹ Linda Charnes, ‘We were never early modern’, Philosophical Shakespeares, ed. John Joughin (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 54–68.

¹³⁰ Jan Gresil Kahambing, ‘Diaspora as Vanishing Mediator: Emancipation of Identity for the Mamanuas of Basey, Samar’, Philippines and Asian Studies: Expositions, Explorations, and Expectations, eds. Felicidad Galang-Pereña, Roberto Ampil, Emmanuel Gonzales, Niña Christina Lazaro-Zamora (Rizal: Word Prints Publishing Services, Inc., 2018), 183–200.

¹³¹ Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. Creston Davis (Boston: The MIT Press, 2009).

¹³² John Wills, Disney Culture (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 21.

¹³³ Johnson Cheu, Introduction: Re-casting and Diversifying Disney in the Age of Globalization. In Diversity in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability ed. Johnson Cheu (USA: McFarland, 2013), 1.

¹³⁴ Amany Elmogahzy, A ‘Whole New World’: Race and Representation in Disney’s Live-Action Remakes of Aladdin, The Lion King, and Mulan (Thesis, Auburn University, 2018), 43.

¹³⁵ Elena Di Giovanni, ‘Cultural Otherness and Global Communication in Walt Disney Films at the Turn of the Century’, The Translator 9, no. 2 (2003), 207–23.

¹³⁶ Alexa Smith and Gabrielle Wongso, ‘The Same Old World: How the 2019 Aladdin Fails to Rectify the Mistakes of the Original,’ https://rtfgenderandmediaculture.wordpress.com/2020/11/18/the-same-old-world-how-the-2019-aladdin-fails-to-rectify-the-mistakes-of-the-original/ (Accessed: January 6, 2021).

¹³⁷ MD Mohiul Islam and Nilufa Akter, ‘Disney’s Aladdin (2019), the Old Rum in the New Bottle’, Ultimacomm: Jurnal Ilmu Komunikasi 12, no. 1 (2020), 72–87.

¹³⁸ Sarah Coyne and Emily Whitehead, ‘Indirect Aggression in Animated Films’, Journal of Communication 58, no. 2 (2008), 382–95.

¹³⁹ Keisha Hoerrner, ‘Gender Roles in Disney Films: Analyzing Behaviors from Snow White to Simba’, Women’s Studies in Communication 19, no. 2 (1996), 225.

¹⁴⁰ Litsa RenÉe Tanner, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman & Lori K. Lund, ‘Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films,’ The American Journal of Family Therapy 31, no. 5 (2003), 355–73.

¹⁴¹ Dawn Elizabeth England, Lara Descartes, and Melissa Collier-Meek, ‘Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princess’, Sex Roles 64 (2011), 555–567.

¹⁴² See Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves.

¹⁴³ Susan Nance, How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790–1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

¹⁴⁴ John Culhane, Disney’s Aladdin: The Making of an Animated Film (Disney Editions. New York, NY: Hyperion), 10.

¹⁴⁵ Henry Giroux, The mouse that roared: Disney and the end of innocence (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 89, as cited in Celeste Lacroix, ‘Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney’s Cartoon Heroines From the Little Mermaid to the Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Popular Communication 2, no. 4 (2004), 213–29.

¹⁴⁶ I thank the first reviewer for this insight.

¹⁴⁷ Christopher Moreman, ‘On the Relationship between Birds and Spirits of the Dead’, Society & Animals 22 (2014), 481–502.

¹⁴⁸ Michelle Anya Anjirbag, ‘Reforming Borders of the Imagination: Diversity, Adaptation, Transmediation, and Incorporation in the Global Disney Film Landscape,’ Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 11, no. 2 (2019), 151–76.