Disney, Brer Rabbit, and MeConceptualizing Solutions for Cultural Appropriation

By Steven Zepeda, MA Student Graduate Theological Union

Overview1. Self-Reflection and Introduction

2. History of Brer Animal Stories in U.S.

3. Argument on “Cultural Appropriation”

4. Conceptualizing Solutions

5. Referencing Spiritual Frameworks

Self-Reflection and Introduction- Splash Mountain and Song of the South

- Undergraduate research project - 2016

- Princess and the Frog retheme - 2020

- Petitions and Counterpetitions

History of Brer Animal Stories- Often centered around Brer Rabbit (trickster)

- Stories originate in Africa (~)

- Subvert oppressors/oppression

- African American artists use symbols

Still from The Adventures of Brer Rabbit (2006)

Michael Richards’ “Tar Baby vs. St. Sebastian”

History - Uncle Remus Stories- Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908)

- Turnwold Plantation

- “Progressive Conservative?”

- Uncle Remus & Cultural Fetishization

- Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1881)

History - Song of the South- Walt Disney & Clarence Muse

- Song of the South (1946) - meager reception

- African American organizations critical

- Four re-releases cement popularity

- “White backlash” to Civil Rights

Promotional photo for Song of the South

Protesters outside of Paramount theater in Oakland, CATo white audiences who felt that African Americans were asking for too much

progress, too much change--to whites who, like many Southerners after the Civil War, believed blacks could only advance by taking something away from whites--Song of the South was a pleasant retreat into an imagined past in which people of color knew their place, which was subordinate to whites.

- Katrina Longworth, Six Degrees of Song of the South

History - Splash Mountain - Follows Brer Rabbit (absent Uncle Remus)

- Anaheim (1989), Tokyo & Orlando (1992)

- Whitewashes controversial elements - positive reception

- Disney ignores criticism of film

- Retheme announced 2020

Brer animal animatronics

What is Cultural Appropriation?- Notoriously contested definitions

- Patti Tamara Lenard & Peter Balint

- Analyze “public discourse” (esp. social media)

- Three conditions

- Value condition

- Contested condition

- Knowledge, or culpable ignorance, condition

Is it Cultural Appropriation?

Conditions Joel Chandler Harris Walt Disney Myself

Value Subversive/Survivalist function of the stories

Alice Walker critique of Disney

“Family study” in 1998 indicates value

Contested How does one “contest” when oppressed?

Hampton Folklore Society (1893-1900) ?

Clarence MuseNAACPNational Urban LeagueFilm protesters

“Reclamation Projects” show contest

Knowledge / culpable ignorance

Recorded them because of their value

Discusses origins in Harris documentary

Not at first (?)Started with my research in 2016

Conceptualizing Solutions- Jason Baird Jackson - Folklorist - N.A.

- Native American kinship —> Relationality & Responsibility

- Creates self- and social- monitoring

- Lack of either leads to appropriation

- Harris & Disney lacked “responsibility”

- I lacked both

Solutions — Strengthening Relationality- Cause —> Solution

- What caused my 180?

- “Reclamation Projects” by African American artists

- “Imagined” relationality

- First step

He took them for his purposes, I’m taking them back for mine - Arthur Flowers

Solutions — Strengthening Responsibility- Frederick Chambers & online supporters

- Emulation

- Second (and final) step

- “Shift in conscience”

Spiritual Frameworks - Wyrd- Religions often conceptualize responsible relationships

- Wyrd (pronounced “weird”), Germanic meaning “fate”

- In Heathenry, matrix of “fates”

- Bottom-up approach

- Building relationality —> More responsibility

“Web of Wyrd” symbols

The weaving of the tapestry occurs when the deeds of others intertwine with your own. Your wyrd crosses that of everyone with whom you come into contact – family, friends, classmates, and colleagues. Your deeds affect their wyrd, and theirs affect yours. The more contact you have, the more actions you have taken together, the more closely intertwined your threads in the fabric- Karl E.H. Seigfried, pagan scholar and chaplain

Spiritual Frameworks - “Pupil of the Eye”- Analogy by ʻAbdu'l-Bahá — Bahá'í Faith

- Relates Black people to eye’s black pupil

- Common interpretation is of “spiritual insight”

- All of humanity benefits

Thou art like unto the pupil of the eye which is dark in color, yet it is the fount of light and the revealer of the contingent world

Spiritual Frameworks - “Pupil of the Eye”- ʻAbdu'l-Bahá “embodies” races in analogy

- Conceptualizes humanity as singular body

- Each group’s health contributes to collective health

- When we harm other cultural groups through our acts of cultural appropriation, we ultimately damage all of humankind.

- Top-down approach

- Inherent relationality —> inherent responsibility

The second attribute of perfection is justice and impartiality...It means to consider the welfare of the community as one’s own. It means, in brief, to regard humanity as a single individual, and one’s own self as a member of that corporeal form, and to know of a certainty that if pain or injury afflicts any member of that body, it must inevitably result in suffering for all the rest

Selected ReadingsOn Brer Animal origins and appropriation:

Wagner, Bryan. The Tar Baby: A Global History. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Marshall, Emily Zobel. American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit. Rowan & Littlefield, 2019.

Longworth, Karina. Six Degrees of Song of the South. You Must Remember This. (series available on podcast apps)

Reclamation Projects:Williams, Nathan. “Bruh Rabbit And the Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq.” Make-Believe. (available on podcast apps)

Okoye, Nkeiru. “Brer Rabbit, Tales from the Briar Patch.” (available on Vimeo or Youtube)

Flowers, Arthur. Brer Rabbit Retold. India: Tara Books, 2017. (select stories available on Vimeo or Youtube)

Q&A and Discussion- Start with Q&A

1. Do this research give you insight into other acts of cultural appropriation?

2. How might we strengthen relationality and responsibility in these cases?

3. What are the benefits and limitations of addressing cultural appropriation

by strengthening relationality and responsibility?

Bibliography’Abdu’l-Bahá. “Selections from the Writings of ’Abdu’l-Bahá 78.” Accessed April 28, 2021.

https://www.bahai.org/library/authoritative-texts/abdul-baha/selections-writings-abdul-baha/1#324741256.‘Abdu’l-Bahá. The Secret of Divine Civilization. Translated by Marzieh Gail. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1990.Bakare. “Disney Plus Streaming Site Will Not Offer ‘Racist’ Song of the South Film.” the Guardian, April 23, 2019.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/23/disney-plus-streaming-site-will-not-offer-racist-song-of-the-south-film.Bickley, R.B. “Uncle Remus Tales.” Text. New Georgia Encyclopedia, October 3, 2002.

https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/uncle-remus-tales.“Bruh Rabbit And the Fantastic Telling of Remington Ellis, Esq.” Make-Believe. Accessed April 15, 2021. https://makebelieve.fm/bruhrabbit.Flowers, Arthur. Brer Rabbit Retold. India: Tara Books, 2017.Gailey, Amanda. “Uncle Remus’s Cultural Afterlife.” The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature,

1880-1939. Accessed August 13, 2020. http://childlit.unl.edu/topics/edi.afterlife.html.Grater, Tom. “Bob Iger Confirms ‘Song Of The South’ Won’t Be Added To Disney+, Even With Disclaimer.” Deadline (blog), March 11, 2020.

https://deadline.com/2020/03/bob-iger-song-of-the-south-disney-disclaimer-1202879464/.Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. 11th ed. Project Gutenberg, 2003.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2306/2306-h/2306-h.htm.Hill, Jim. “Rewriting Uncle Remus.” Jim Hill Media, March 13, 2005. http://jimhillmedia.com/editor_in_chief1/b/jim_hill/archive/2005/03/14/541.aspx.Hopkins, Joseph, and Lauren E. Fountain. “Kvasir Symbol Database: The Web of Wyrd.” Mimisbrunnr.info: Developments in Ancient Germanic

Studies, March 2020. https://www.mimisbrunnr.info/ksd-web-of-wyrd.Jackson, Jason Baird. “On Cultural Appropriation.” Journal of Folklore Research 58, no. 1 (2021): 77–122.Jackson, Wilfred. Song of the South. RKO Radio Pictures, 1946.Lenard, Patti Tamara, and Peter Balint. “What Is (the Wrong of) Cultural Appropriation?” Ethnicities 20, no. 2 (2020): 331–52.Leslie, Annie R. “What African American Mothers Perceive They Socialize Their Children to Value When Telling Them Brer Rabbit Stories.” Journal of

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Bibliography continuedLongworth, Karina. “Blaxploitation and the White Backlash (Six Degrees of Song of the South, Episode 5).” You Must Remember This. Accessed

August 13, 2020. http://www.youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/2019/11/12/blaxploitation-and-the-white-backlash-six-degrees-of-song-of-the-south-episode-5.

Macdonald, Brady. “Meet the Disneyland Cast Member Who Wants to Change Splash Mountain’s Story.” Orange County Register (blog), June 19, 2020. https://www.ocregister.com/2020/06/19/meet-the-disneyland-cast-member-who-wants-to-change-splash-mountains-story.

Matthews, John T. “How Remus Frames Race: The Plantation after the Plantation.” In Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris, 84–111. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2020.

O., Alex. “Retheme Splash Mountain to Princess and the Frog.” Change.Org (blog), June 2020. https://www.change.org/p/the-walt-disney-company-re-theme-splash-mountain-to-princess-and-the-frog.

Ramirez, Michael. “New Adventures with Princess Tiana Coming to Disneyland Park and Magic Kingdom Park.” Disney Parks Blog, June 25, 2020. https://disneyparks.disney.go.com/blog/2020/06/new-adventures-with-princess-tiana-coming-to-disneyland-park-and-magic-kingdom-park/.

Russo, Peggy A. “Uncle Walt’s Uncle Remus: Disney’s Distortion of Harris’s Hero.” The Southern Literary Journal 25, no. 1 (1992): 26.Sampson, Wade. “Song of the South That Never Was.” Mouse Planet. Accessed April 28, 2021.

https://www.mouseplanet.com/8584/Song_of_the_South_That_Never_Was.Seigfried, Karl E. H. “Wyrd Will Weave Us Together.” Norse Myth (blog), November 30, 2016.

https://www.norsemyth.org/2016/11/wyrd-will-weave-us-together.html.Smith, Derik. “Centering the ‘Pupil of the Eye’: Blackness, Modernity, and the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh.” The Journal of Bahá’í Studies 29, no. 1–2

(2019): 7–28.BoldAsLove.us. “Tonight: Aisha Cousins’ ‘Brer Rabbit: The Opera,’” January 22, 2015.

http://boldaslove.us/2015/01/22/tonight-aisha-cousins-brer-rabbit-the-opera/.Wagner, Bryan. The Tar Baby: A Global History. Princeton University Press, 2017.Walker, Alice. “Uncle Remus, No Friend of Mine.” The Georgia Review 66, no. 3 (n.d.): 635–37.