Caged Pedagogies: Disney’s Animal Kingdom, Affect, and Colonial Experience

• In Event: Feeling Disney: Affective Pedagogies In Walt Disney’s World

Proposal Description

American zoos see more than 180 million visitors each year (American Zoo Association, 2016). The experience in zoos is one premised upon visitor expectations that are belied by the extensive narrative constructed by zoological gardens over the course of the past century. Zoos enable the visitor to get close to dangerous animals without any risk (or so we presume). This adventure is further enabled through years of imperial narratives imposed upon exotic places, people, and animals. In this paper we examine the complex fictions narrated by Disney’s Animal Kingdom regarding the people, animals, and places represented in their attractions and exhibits. Recognizing that zoological parks are a part of the “out of school curriculum” (Schubert, 1981, 2006), this paper explores how Disney’s affective zoo pedagogies are experienced during a visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. This critique focuses primarily on the African Safari and the representation of African and Asian people, places, and animals as a neo-colonial legacy of the Western imperial project. Our research draws theoretically from (1) Disney studies, especially scholarship within cultural curriculum studies troubling Disney as a form of public pedagogy and exploring affect as one mechanism through which Disney’s pedagogies work; and (2) animal and zoo studies, broadly defined, especially work that seeks to understand how animals “mediate social relations,” how “humanity is constituted through multispecies encounters” (Parrenas, 2012, p. 675), as well as traditions of post-colonial critiques of the zoological museum. We position our project as being part of the emergent posthumanism project in curriculum studies that seeks to “always engage the human as problematic” (Snaza, et. al., 2014).

Our examination of Disney’s affective zoo pedagogies has yielded three main insights into the ways in which Disney melds entertainment, immersion, and narrative into an affective experience that reifies a colonial ordering of the world. First, a visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom is, above all, an entertaining experience. In this way, Disney is an honest zoo. Many zoos claim a primary mission of conservation education and scientific advancement, but it is hard for zoological institutions to escape the trappings of being an entertainment venue with wild animals on display, concessions, and gift shops. Disney fully embraces the latter. And while Disney’s Animal Kingdom professes goals of science, conservation, and education, these play a distant second to the entertainment—much of it premised upon producing and facilitating affective investments among visitors who consume Disney’s marketing of excitement, (controlled) “danger,” and adventure—afforded by elaborate immersive experiences that draw upon colonial narratives of exotic travel to far reaches of the globe. Second, it is this concept of exotic travel that sets Animal Kingdom apart from the typical zoo experience. Whereas many zoos create an immersion experience for the duration of a particular exhibit or building, Animal Kingdom creates entire regions that provide constant immersion, to make the visitor feel as if they are there—the fictional East African town of Harambe, for example, invites visitors across a footbridge into a town center, with an open air market, al fresco dining, and live music performances. The authenticity of the immersion—the believability of it—is premised upon symbols that tap into our common sense assumptions about and affective investments in places, people, and animals, many of which have been created by Disney itself through the depictions of animal and human relationships it has provided for decades via its nature and animated films. Immersion exhibits create what Nigel Rothfels (2008) calls a “convincing verisimilitude,” which facilitates feelings of ‘realness’ and ‘authenticity’ when one encounters the fictional town Harambe, for example, and which draws upon tropes made common via popular culture, thus helping to fit Harambe into a broader schema of Africa as envisioned and felt by the Western consciousness. Finally, through these immersive experiences, Disney accomplishes a visitor as star phenomenon, whereby we are rendered “the out-of-the-frame star of the narratives, as witness and controller” (King, 1996, p. 61). Beyond an exhibit where the visitor strolls a gallery and views animals in naturalistic enclosures, they are now led to believe that they share the space with the exotic exhibited creatures. But the predicament remains—animals are enclosed by the narratives and cages created by the zoo.

Authors

• Jason Lukasik, Augsburg College

• Jennifer April Sandlin, Arizona State University