Disneyfication

    We know how Walt Disney parks and resorts look like. Now, imagine, a city being commercially transformed to look like that. The transformation of a city so, to look like a Disney creation is known as Disneyfication or Disneyisation. The term was coined by American Sociologist Sharon Zukin. This term is usually used in a negative sense because the disneyfication of a city drains it off its originality. In literature, this term can be applied to the narrative of urban and suburban spaces.

    It is deeply rooted in commodification and consumer culture. It is a cultural capitalism that commodifies everything. It includes spectacle, consumption activities and spatial control (surveillance). Unfortunately, the poor are excluded from this unaffordable consumption. It widens the gap between the high class elite and the common people. 

    The history of disneyfication can be traced way back to colonialism. It is considered to have formed out of  US neoliberal global capitalism. It has a direct connection to the US World Fairs held in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These fairs had a direct impact on the Disney theme parks as far as the visual aspect is concerned. Lorenzo Alexander Lero Puente in his PhD thesis titled “The Commodification  of Everything: Disneyfication and Filippino American Narratives of Globalisation and Diaspora" includes the Columbian World Fair and the 1939 New York Fair as examples for this. But he says that the similarities go beyond just the physical layout. The fairs and the disney theme parks share similar world view of American exceptionalism:

1. The idea that America is the superior nation.

2. Their corporate character aimed at progress using leisure consumption.

3. They had the similar way of looking at people of other cultures and ethnicities(They usually highlighted and catered to US modernity and other cultures were just side shows in these fairs)

    The sideshowing of other cultures is a whole another history. An example can be the 1851 Great Exhibition (London) which showed an Indian exhibit. This side showing was also a colonial strategy to show the power and magnificence of the master. An example here could be the 1904 St. Louis Exhibition that featured new US territories. 

    William Graebner considers it as a "collective dream" of the 1950s where Disneyland represents the fantastic, imaginary world of prosperity which, by the way, could be afforded mostly by the White middle class. George Lipsitz talks about the racist instances in the Disneyland where a disney restaurant had the 'Mammy' stereotype of Black women - the fat, nuturing, devoted-to-the-master stereotype which became so with Margaret Mitchell's American Classic Gone with the Wind and the academy award winning movie of the same name. Disneyland was constructed in the 1950s and it showcased the dominant ideologies of the time. 

    Zukin sees the management of public spaces by Disney company in three dimensions: Visual Culture/spectacle(a fantasy of what modern people should be), spatial control (surveillance, use of service and controlling the labourers in their contact with customers) and Private Management.

    In his An Introduction to Cultural Studies, Pramod K. Nayar analyzes 'the mall' as a space of consumption. He regards it as a fantasy world into which people enter in order to get the superficial perfection of the models on the posters of the mall. The people participate in this fantasy which the mall ensures and this is also an instance of disneyfication. Our country, India, is also gradually getting disneyfied. It has already occured in many spheres. So, disneyfication is a very relevant subject of study as far as Indian culture is concerned. As Lorenzo Alexander Lero Puente says, "ultimately, Disneyfication studies can contribute to spatial justice, the taking back of public spaces from corporate control and transforming them into genuinely democratic spaces." (40)

References

L. Puente, Lorenzo Alexander. The Commodification  of Everything: Disneyfication and Filippino American Narratives of Globalisation and Diaspora. 2014. Boston College, PhD Thesis, https://dlib.bc.edu/islandora/object/bc-ir:104086/datastream/PDF/view

Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies, Viva Books, 2008.

Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1995.