Aladdin (film) Bibliography

UC Berkeley's Library has a great list of resources and bibliographic information on representations of race in other works, especially film at their website here:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/FilmBibMenu.html

Part of their list is on the Disney film Aladdin and most of the material in their bibliography is (like most all info written on the film) focused on the "representation of Arabs" in the film.

I've pasted their bibliography below though if you go through the UCB website (http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/disney.html#aladdin) you'll have direct access to many of the articles for free if you are online via your local university's library website and even more if you are a UC user.  I've also deleted their annotations on this list to avoid plagiarizing and I'll be adding more to the list as there are several articles not listed on their website and articles not dealing with Orientalism that should be on this list.  So!  If you are studying the film Aladdin come here and go there!  Recheck citations too for any papers you use these in.

Addison, Erin.  "Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney's Aladdin." Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies, vol. 31. 1993 Jan-May. pp: 5-25.

"'Aladdin' Bows to a Protest." New York Times v142, sec1 (Sun, July 11, 1993):9(N), 16(L), col 4, 8 col in.

 

"'Aladdin' Song Lyrics Altered." Facts on File v53, n2747 (July 22, 1993):552.

 

Anwar, Farrah.  "Aladdin." Sight and Sound Dec 1993 v3 n12 p38(2).

Bannon, Lisa.  "How a Rumor Spread About Subliminal Sex in Disney's 'Aladdin"', The Wall Street Journal, l0/24/95.

Britt, Donna.  "2 Films Spin Their Own Special Magic.” Washington Post v115 (Fri, Nov 13, 1992):D1, col 1, 18 col in.

Cooperson, Michael. “The Monstrous Births of Aladdin.” The Arabian Nights Reader. Ulrich Marzolph, ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006: 265-282.

Corliss, Richard.  "Aladdin's Magic." Time v140, n19 (Nov 9, 1992):74 (3 pages).

Corrigan, Don.  "Aladdin - Like Much of U.S. Entertainment and Media - is Flawed by Stereotypes." St. Louis Journalism Review v22, n153 (Feb, 1993):13 (2 pages).

Felperin Sharman, Leslie.  "New Aladdins for Old." Sight & Sound ( III/11, Nov 93; p.12-15).

Felperin, Leslie.  "The Thief of Buena Vista: Disney's Aladdin and Orientalism."  A reader in animation studies / edited by Jayne Pilling. London : J. Libbey, c1997.

Fox, David J.  "Disney Will Alter Song in 'Aladdin.'" Los Angeles Times v112 (Sat, July 10, 1993):F1, col 5, 17 col in.

Geist, Kenneth.  "Aladdin."  Films in Review March-April 1993 v44 n3-4 p127(2)

Gorchev, Leila.  "When Will it be Okay to be an Arab?" Washington Post v116 (Sun, Dec 27, 1992):C7, col 2, 16 col in.

Irwin, Robert.  "Aladdin." TLS. Times Literary Supplement Dec 24, 1993 n4734 p14(2)

"It's Racist, But Hey, It's Disney."  New York Times v142 (Wed, July 14, 1993):A14(N), A18(L), col 1, 6 col in.

Klawans, Stuart.  "Aladdin." The Nation Dec 7, 1992 v255 n19 p713(4).

Kraidy, M.M.  "Intertextual Maneuvers around the Subaltern: Aladdin as a Postmodern Text," in C. Degli-Esposti (ed.) Postmodernism in the Cinema, pp. 44-59. New York: Berghahn Books, 1998.

Kreck, Dick. "Is 'Aladdin' More Than Meets Ear?" The Denver Post, 4 June 1994.

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. "The Politics of Vision: Disney, Aladdin, and the Gulf War."  The Emperor's old groove: decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom / edited by Brenda Ayres. pp: 179-91. New York: P. Lang, 2003.

Maslin, Janet.  "Aladdin." The New York Times Nov 11, 1992 v142.

Phillips, Jerry.  "Telling Tales to Children: The Pedagogy of Empire in MGM's Kim and Disney's Aladdin." The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature vol. 20 no. 1. 1996 June. pp: 66-89.

Nadel Alan.  "A whole new (Disney) world order: Aladdin, atomic power, and the Muslim Middle East." Visions of the East: orientalism in film / edited by Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c1997.

Phillips, Jerry and Ian Wojcik-Andrews.  "Telling Tales to Children: The Pedagogy of Empire in MGM's Kim and Disney's Aladdin." The Lion and the Unicorn 20.1 (1996) 66-89.

Rossmiller, David. "Get Naked? Aladdin Allegedly Makes Crude Remark."The Phoenix Gazette, 12 March 1994.

Scheinin, Richard.  "Angry Over 'Aladdin."  Washington Post v116 (Sun, Jan 10, 1993):G1, col 1, 36 col in.

Shaheen, Jack.  "Aladdin: Animated Racism." Cineaste, vol. 20 no. 1. 1993. pp: 49.

Scheinin, Richard.  "In Its New "Family Film," Disney Clobbers Arabs-Again!" The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. May 2004. Vol. 23, Iss. 4; p. 66.

Schmidt, Carolyn Speer.  "Not just Disney : destructive stereotypes of Arabs in children's literature." Arabs in the Americas : interdisciplinary essays on the Arab diaspora / edited by Darcy A. Zabel. New York : Peter Lang, c2006.

Sharman, Leslie Felperin.  "New Aladdins for Old." Sight and Sound v3, n11 (Nov, 1993):12 (4 pages).

Simon, John.  "Aladdin." National Review Dec 14, 1992 v44 n24 p53(2)

Staninger, Christiane.  "Disney's Magic Carpet Ride: Aladdin and Women in Islam."  The emperor's old groove: decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom / edited by Brenda Ayres. pp: 65-77. New York: P. Lang, c2003.

White, Timothy R. and J. E. Winn.  "Islam, Animation and Money: The Reception of Disney's Aladdin in Southeast Asia." Kinema, Spring 1995.

Wise, Christopher.  "Notes from the Aladdin Industry: Or, Middle Eastern Folklore in the Era of Multinational Capitalism." The emperor's old groove: decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom / edited by Brenda Ayres. pp: 105-14 New York: P. Lang, c2003.

Master Bibliography

This page will be the page where all bibliographic lists will be linked.  I'm a bit wary of making categories because there is just so much written on the Nights that an article or book would be able to fit in several but I'll try and make the categories as loose as possible, with annotations below.

Beginner's Bibliography
http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2009/06/beginners-bibliography.html
This is less of a strict bibliography and more of a "starting point" list I made for books and articles I would recommend to anyone beginning to study the Nights (or even those of you at an advanced-Nights level).

Aladdin (film) Bibliography
http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2010/12/aladdin-film-bibliography.html
A list of articles and books on the Disney film Aladdin.

1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972)

From 1001 Nights

This is an Italian film I haven't seen yet (a French poster for it) with (according to the fun review posted below) has little to do with the Nights (though it has an interesting take on the frame story to be sure), is not that overtly erotic (yet is marketed as being so) and does not feature prominently, as promised, the film star Barbara Bouchet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Bouchet).  What can you do.  Perfect variant of the Nights?

Here's a snippet of the review:

"1001 Nights of Pleasure aka (Finalmente... le mille e una notte or Les mille et une nuits érotiques) is a film that not only advertises Barbara Bouchett as the lead star on posters and DVD covers but also gives her top billing in the opening credits; shockingly she doesn't make an appearance until about 3/4th's of the way through.  To describe this film quickly and bluntly it's simply pure sleaze, an Italian sex comedy with a lot of implied sex and not a whole lot of comedy, at least nothing I found very amusing.  The basic plot of the film is an Arabia sultan receives a new beautiful slave (played by the second and only other good looking woman in the film Femi Benussi) only to discover he's got a serious case of erectile dysfunction (wonder how many Google hits I'll get off of that!?!).  In an attempt to regain the use of his manhood he issues a proclamation for people in the city to tell him an erotic story, if they fail to arouse him they will be beheaded."

and the review:http://www.commonsensemoviereviews.com/2010/11/1001-nights-of-pleasure-1972.html

and the film on imdb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068589/

Eastern Dreams review in thestar.com

Here is an excerpt from a recent review of Paul Nurse's Eastern Dreams in The Toronto Star newspaper and website.  It's an ok review, some critique of the academic nature of the language but overall a positive one.  A link to the review follows the snippet and the artwork is linked from the Star as well.

Published On Fri Nov 26 2010

Susan Goldenberg

"Among the interesting points:

 • Why is a book with nowhere near 1,001 stories (less than a third, actually) widely known as The Thousand and One Nights? Nurse explains that in ancient Arabic society, 1,000 “denoted the highest number attainable.” Thus, 1,000 denoted infinity or a never-ending story. As for why 1,001, Muslims considered odd numbers “to be intrinsically worthier” than even figures. “From the classical Muslim perspective, Scheherazade, to make her stories worthy, to imbue them with luck, required an extra night,” Nurse writes.

 • The world’s most famous Arabic storybook, Nurse points out, is actually “a compendium of tales culled from India, Persia, Arabia, Ottoman Turkey and Egypt, probably infused as well with stories from Hebrew, Greek and Roman sources.” For example: The striking similarity between Sinbad’s fight with a carnivorous, one-eyed giant and Odysseus’s battle with the Cyclops Polyphemus in The Odyssey.

 • The popular stories of Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali-Baba and the Forty Thieves were not part of the original but picked up from various Arabic sources by Frenchman Antoine Galland, “the man who brought Nights to the West” with his translations in the early 1700s. Galland is responsible for the often used shorthand title Arabian Nights because, as a shrewd marketer, he capitalized on the West’s fascination with the “East,” particularly Arabia.

 • Nights influenced Western literary greats Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. In “The Christmas Tree,” Dickens enthused about the impact on children: “All common things become uncommon and enchanted. All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans.” Edgar Allan Poe concocted “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade,” in which she tells her husband about a land resembling the 19th-century Western world. He goes along with her talking about such inventions as the telegraph and steam power, but is enraged when she describes a woman’s bustle. Regarding it as beyond acceptable boundaries, he orders her execution after all.

 • There are marked similarities between Nights’ Sinbad and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

 • The Arab world is ambivalent about Nights because of its often violent and sexual content, feeling that it gives a bad impression. Still, Nights is popular reading among the inmates at Guantanamo along with another set of fanciful books, Harry Potter.

Susan Goldenberg is a Toronto author and freelance writer."

link to article: http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/article/897590--eastern-dreams-how-the-arabian-nights-came-to-the-world