scholarly journals Black Normativity and Burdened Individualism

Author(s):  
Graham Revare

The Walt Disney Company has a marred past; the products that powered its explosive growth to an entertainment conglomerate depicted grossly racist stereotypes. Seeking to wash its hands of this controversial past, Disney released The Princess and the Frog (TPF), its first film featuring a Black protagonist. The film deserves recognition for its efforts to bring representation to Black Americans. But lurking in Disney’s redemption project is a noticeable revisionist whitewashing of American history. The film’s plot begins when Tiana, short on money and seeking to rescue her incipient dream to open a restaurant, accepts a prince-transmuted-frog’s offer to reward her for kissing him. When she compromises her unyielding adherence to “hard work,” she transforms into a frog. The film’s very narrative structure is built on what Saidiya Hartman labels “burdened individualism,” a discourse that demands Black Americans ceaselessly pursue market ascendency while stripping them of the tools to do so.

Author(s):  
Monika Boguszewicz-Kreft ◽  
Jan Kreft ◽  
Piotr Żurek

Myth and mythologization have been accompanying organizations, their leaders, and even their products. Considering management, the history of an organization, its models, and underlying values undergo the process of mythologization. Myths are conveyed via storytelling. Considering the case of the Walt Disney Company, which has become a “narrative company,” the myth used to accompany its founder, who carefully developed it. Applied by the company and always present, storytelling has contributed to the corporate hegemony, strengthening a new marketing paradigm – “mythocracy,” a belief that an organization that has something to sell cannot do so without storytelling. At the same time, while the cultural heritage of Disney is fully commodified, storytelling becomes closer to propaganda. In the environment of digital media, a lot of our knowledge about an organization comes as a result of storytelling marketing, and the marketing-ization of an organization identity takes place. It usually occurs when the boundary between an organization and its receivers (producers) becomes blurred.


2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (4) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Orquidea Morales

In 2013, the Walt Disney Company submitted an application to trademark “Día de los muertos” (Day of the Dead) as they prepared to launch a holiday themed movie. Almost immediately after this became public Disney faced such strong criticism and backlash they withdrew their petition. By October of 2017 Disney/Pixar released the animated film Coco. Audiences in Mexico and the U.S. praised it's accurate and authentic representation of the celebration of Day of the Dead. In this essay, I argue that despite its generic framing, Coco mobilizes many elements of horror in its account of Miguel's trespassing into the forbidden space of the dead and his transformation into a liminal figure, both dead and alive. Specifically, with its horror so deftly deployed through tropes and images of borders, whether between life and death or the United States and Mexico, Coco falls within a new genre, the border horror film.


Author(s):  
Stephen Maiden ◽  
Case Writer ◽  
Gerry Yemen ◽  
Elliott N. Weiss ◽  
Oliver Wight

The strategic and tactical problems of managing the operations function in a service environment can be examined through the context of the Walt Disney Company (DIS) opening Shanghai Disneyland. The company and its investors were excited about the Shanghai opening for a good reason: demographics. The resort would be located in the Pudong district of Shanghai, easily the wealthiest of all of China’s districts. A massive 330 million people lived with a three-hour driving radius of the resort site, compared with 19.6 million who lived within the same radius at DIS’s most profitable park, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Still, risks remained. Construction complications had delayed the opening almost a year longer than expected and cost overruns and alterations had increased the final price tag of the project. The Chinese economy had also hit a rough patch following the Chinese stock market slump in the summer of 2015. With the world watching, could the classic Disney theme park experience be delivered with the right cultural balance to appeal to its largely Chinese customers? Could DIS get it right?


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elliott N. Weiss ◽  
Gerry Yemen ◽  
Stephen E Maiden

Author(s):  
Gwynne Tuell Potts

Casual readers of American history may assume the United States enjoyed relative peace between the end of the Revolution and the War of 1812, but in fact, the West remained in turmoil and Kentucky lay at the center of British, French, and Spanish intrigue. Kentuckians struggled with significant decisions leading to statehood: should they remain part of Virginia, join the United States, or become an independent entity aligned with another nation? Navigation rights on the Mississippi River were at the heart of Kentuckians’ concerns, and as long as the federal government refused to negotiate the matter with Spain, most farmers initially were reluctant to commit themselves and their children to land-locked futures. George Rogers Clark, with the encouragement of his former soldiers, agreed to lead a contingent of settlers to form a colony on the Mississippi. Going so far as to ask Spain for permission to do so (as did Sevier, Steuben, and others), Clark unnerved the federal government.


2016 ◽  
pp. 139-144
Author(s):  
Evan M. Forman ◽  
Meghan L. Butryn

This chapter (Session 23) discusses how to maintain long-term motivation for weight control by focusing on the importance of values to motivate behavior, even if short-term reward of weight control behaviors is decreasing (e.g., weight loss is slowing, self-monitoring is becoming tiresome). Clients are encouraged to view the hard work of weight control as working toward their values and to use the skill of willingness to continue to engage in healthy behaviors, even when it is difficult uncomfortable to do so.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (3/4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatjana Menise

One of the ways in which culture becomes enriched is through reconsideration and reinterpretation of well-known stories, and classic fairy tales provide promising material for investigation of the nature of this complex process. The Walt Disney Company is among the most powerful tellers of classic tales, its line of princess animations being an example of simultaneous development and preservation of the fairy-tale phenomenon in a changing cultural context. We analyse the dialogue among classic and modern princess stories and the discussions that these stories give rise to in English-language academic criticism and English-based participatory culture. We focus on the interaction among authors, texts and readers, showing how traditional tales balance between mythological and nonmythological consciousness, between innovative and canonical art. The diversity of fans’ practices may be seen as a key to possible explanation of why fairy tales exist in culture as a complex, constantly growing web, not as a limited number of selected final versions. Amateur authors demonstrate their interest in the mythopoetics of classic fairy tale plots. They are attracted by the old romantic myth that stands behind princess stories, participate in the creation of the romantic antimyth that is supported by the professional critics, and expect the appearance of new modern myths that might be generated by the new productions of Disney. New fairy tales appear, but this does not result in the disappearance of the old ones. Not only the interests towards the plots themselves, but also discussions and conflict around classic stories keep them topical for contemporary heterogeneous audiences.


Author(s):  
Lynn A. Isabella ◽  
Gerry Yemen

“What kind of culture does Walt Disney Company (WDC) want to create? This case uses the experiences of a young visitor to one of WDC's resort hotels to set the stage for an analysis of selecting, hiring, training, and retaining and how those practices are governed by the culture of a large American company. The situation provides an opportunity to explore human resource policies, organizational design as well as how all those elements reinforce the culture.The case opens with an interaction between a young Animal Kingdom Lodge guest and an employee (or cast member as the company refers to employees). There were many different ways the exchange could have unfolded yet the experience was magical for the youngster. What made this exchange a memorable experience for this young guest? Would Walt Disney have been surprised?”


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 (30) ◽  
pp. 11-32
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Muszyńska ◽  
Elżbieta Tomaszewska-Taton

Val d’Europe c’est une nouvelle ville réalisée en Région Parisienne, sur la base d’une convention PPP (Partenariat Public-Privé), signée en 1987 entre l’Etat Français et Euro Disney Associés filiale de The Walt Disney Company. La ville prévue initialement pour 60 000 habitants, compte actuellement 35 000 et reste la dernière composante d’une ville linéaire de quarante kilomètres – Marne-La-Vallée, satellite de Paris. La ville a été réalisée initialement en tant qu’une ville « service » du plus grand complexe touristique d’Europe – Euro Disney, accueillant 15 000 000 millions de visiteurs par an, mais progressivement elle est devenue un organisme indépendant et multifonctionnel. Depuis plus de 20 ans Val d’Europe se développe harmonieusement, son territoire est passé de 5 000 à 35 000 habitants et de quelques dizaines d’emplois agricoles à 27 000 emplois diversifiés. La méthodologie du développement de la ville proposée par Euro Disney a épousé les méthodes de travail d’EPA (Etablissement Public d’Aménagement), riche de 50 ans d’expérience dans la réalisation des villes satellitaires autour de Paris. La grande force qui guide les deux équipes réside dans la vision commune de la ville et dans leurs capacités à mettre leurs expériences au service du territoire. L’objectif commun des tous les acteurs publics et privés étant la création d’une ville où la dynamique économique rime avec la qualité de la vie et l’écologie. Dans la recherche de la vision du Val d’Europe, les architectes et les urbanistes ont décidés de s’inspirer de ce que Paris et l’Europe ont fait de mieux dans ces domaines. La ville neuve est composée de quartiers à l’échelle humaine, dont les limites sont fixées par le temps de marche. La communication piéton est la base de la circulation dans la ville, les voitures pour lesquelles les parkings sont prévus dans les sous-sols des bâtiments sont tolérées, mais leur circulation est limitée. La conception et la réalisation de la ville a été conçue par des urbanistes et des architectes américains, luxembourgeois, grecs, italiens et français. Afin d’assurer la qualité des espaces publics et semi-publics, tous les bâtiments ont étaient réalisés suite aux concours promoteurs-architectes. Ce projet urbain d’une indéniable qualité a été réalisé grâce à un art de compromis, où dans l’intérêt général, tous les acteurs ont accepté la réalisation de leurs visions architecturales dans le cadre de la même composition urbaine. Ils ont tout simplement décidé d’agir de concert, comme un orchestre, dans lequel les musiciens interprètent la même partition sur différents instruments.


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