Arabs and Muslims in the Eyes of Disney from the Old Aladdin to the New: A MCDA Perspective.

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ensuring positive representations of other cultures and ethnicities in film production has become very challenging due to the changing structure of our societies and the increasing emphasis on notions such as diversity and inclusion. This research investigates the representation of Muslims and Arabs portrayed in Disney’s movie series of Aladdin. A multimodal critical discourse analysis is conducted on the four Aladdin films to examine how language, music, and images were used to depict Muslims and Arabs, identify the translation strategies used for dubbing the movies into Arabic, and detect any change in Disney’s perspective in depicting the Islamic and Arab culture, by contrasting the first movie of Aladdin to its latest remake. The results showed that the Aladdin movie series was used to communicate Disney's ideologies, which usually conform to the current trends in the mainstream American media in which both Muslims and Arabs are badly represented. Images, language, and accents were combined to establish the difference between good and bad characters. The oppression of women was evident in the lines uttered by various characters and in the way they were dressed. Moreover, the use of accents contributed to reinforcing language-based stereotypes associated with particular groups. Finally, although minor changes were detected in Aladdin (2019), a number of the typical stereotypes for instance the cruelness of Muslims and Arabs were still present in the remade version. Keywords: Audiovisual Translation (AVT), Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), Ideology, Language ideologies, stereotypes, and Translation Strategies.

Date of Award	2023
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	HBKU College of Humanities and Social Science