On the weekend of May 24, 2019, thousands of eager moviegoers flocked to theaters worldwide to watch blue genies grant wishes, magic carpets fly, and true love conquer all in the mystical land of Agrabah. Within the first month of being released, Disney’s live-action reboot of the 1992 animated film Aladdin accrued $729.4 million in box office sales, becoming one of the top grossing musicals in movie history second only Beauty and the Beast released a year before (Bean, 2019). And although the new versions of the lovable “street rat” Aladdin, the joke-cracking Genie, and the villainous Jafar are fairly similar to their animated counterparts, director Guy Ritchie and his co-writer John August made significant changes to one character in particular. Princess Jasmine, formerly hoping to find a loving husband, now yearns to be leader to her people as the Sultan of Agrabah.

In this paper I argue that this drastic character change was an attempt by the creators of the film to eschew the blatant Orientalism of the original, rendering Jasmine newly feminist, modern, and progressive—and therefore making the movie profitable to a mainstream audience. But by placing Jasmine once again in an oppressive context and by casting a South Asian actress to play her role, the creators actually reinforce rather than renounce the deeply problematic Orientalist notions of Arab women seen in the original film.

In the original 1992 Aladdin, the mainstay of Jasmine’s character is that she is a victim. She is hopelessly ensnared by the backward laws of her society mandating that she must marry a prince, restrained by her father’s orders to stay within the palace walls, and ultimately exploited by Jafar’s perverse endeavors in his quest for power. And this repression is a common Orientalist trope. In her essay “Decolonizing Culture: Beyond Orientalist and Anti-Orientalist Feminisms,” Nadine Naber explains that “U.S. Orientalist representations of Arabs and Muslims” specifically include “images of hyperoppressed Arab and Muslim women” who are “perceived to be victims of their culture and religion” (Naber, 2011). In “Arab American Feminisms: Mobilizing the Politics of Invisibility,” Amira Jarmakani similarly explains that Orientalist narratives often feature the “image of exotic, oppressed women who must be saved from their indigenous (hyper)patriarchy” and characterize “Arab and Muslim womanhood as monolithically oppressed” (Jarmakani, 2011).

And Jasmine is, indeed, “monolithically oppressed” in the 1992 animated film. She is forced to marry a prince against her will simply because it is the law and laments that she feels “trapped” because she has “never done a thing on [her] own...[she’s] never even been outside the palace walls” (Aladdin, 1992). When she meets Aladdin at the beginning of the movie, she talks about how she is “not free to make [her] own choices.” Later, when Aladdin reappears as Prince Ali Ababwa and discusses marriage prospects with her father, Jasmine indignantly exclaims: “How dare you? All of you, standing around deciding my future? I am not a prize to be won!” In a scene surprisingly ribald for a children’s movie and strikingly similar to Delacroix’s Orientalist paintings of Middle Eastern harems, Jasmine seduces Jafar to distract him from Aladdin, who has just returned to the palace to save her. “Jafar,” she purrs, “I never realized how incredibly handsome you are." She coquettishly plays with his beard and even kisses him as a last resort. And when Jafar sees Aladdin and catches wind of her deception, he angrily traps her in an hourglass (Aladdin, 1992). Previously entrapped by one Arab man—her father and the societal rules he enforces—Jasmine is now trapped by another: the lustful, power-hungry Arab villain.

But now, times are different—or so we would like to think. The egregious Arab stereotypes and vague exoticism of Aladdin seem to be the problems of yesteryear. Diversity is becoming the new norm within the Disney realm. In 2016 Zootopia, a cartoony criticism of racial stereotypes thinly veiled as an adventure involving an anthropomorphic fox and bunny, hit the theaters. Coco, which came out a year later, was laced with the colorful traditions and tales of Dia de los Muertos and told the touching story of a Mexican boy named Miguel who learns about his family history. When it won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the creators gushed about having a “place for everyone and anyone who feels like an ‘other’ to be heard” and moving towards a “world where all children can grow up seeing characters in movies that look and talk and live like they do...representation matters” (Oscars, 2018). Being inclusive and respectful of other cultures is now in vogue—meaning it is also more profitable. According to a study done by researchers at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA, “films and TV shows with significant levels of diversity [earn] the most revenue and ratings” (Deggans, 2014). And as Martin Norden explains in his essay about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “it’s all about the Disney juggernaut making money” (Norden, 2012).

The 2019 version of Jasmine reflects this money-chasing trend. She is supposedly the princess of a new era—an era espousing anti-racism and mainstream feminism. In an io9 interview, director Guy Ritchie explains: “If there was anything that could use some evolution in this narrative, it was that there needed to be a voice given to Jasmine” (Lussier, 2019). And producer Dan Lin told INSIDER that although audiences “loved [Aladdin] growing up as kids, they “didn't think it held up in today's day and age of female empowerment and even some ethnicity issues.” In order for the “characters to be believable and resonate in this day and age,” he continues, they needed to “make some changes,” the “biggest one obviously...with Jasmine.” In the 2019 remake, they wanted her to be a “modern-day version...where she is looking to lead” (Acuna, 2019). Instead of finding a husband, Jasmine’s character arc is centered around becoming the next sultan to rule the people of Agrabah. And this progressive, “modern-day” message is encapsulated by the climactic song “Speechless,” in which she supposedly breaks free from the silencing shackles placed upon her.

This character revamping was, for the most part, received positively. The Los Angeles Times deemed this new Jasmine to be a princess “for the era of female presidential candidates and the #MeToo movement, reflecting broader societal shifts in gender norms and expectations over the past 27 years,” (Rottenberg, 2019) the Washington Post heralded the “super-feminist” Jasmine as one of the best things about the entire film, (O’Sullivan, 2019) and Refinery29 called “Scott’s Jasmine...more vocal, powerful, and well, an actual character” (Brockington, 2019). And the biggest indicator of the success was box office ticket sales, which amounted to record-breaking $1.26 billion worldwide (Bean, 2019).

But upon closer examination, the new Jasmine is not quite the “super-feminist,” progressive character many moviegoers lauded her to be. The problems she faces in the reboot are actually strikingly similar to those she faces in the original. Jasmine is still a victim of her patriarchal surroundings, oppressed by the Arab men in her life and by Arab society at large. The only difference in the remake is that this oppression takes the form of her debarment from gaining political power rather than finding a husband to marry. When she interjects a political deliberation between Jafar and her father by protesting Agrabah’s invasion of the neighboring region of Shirabad, Jafar is quick to call her inexperienced, even explaining how her taking power could be catastrophic and “dangerous.” Her father has a similar response: “My dear, you cannot be sultan because it has never been done in the 1,000-year history of our kingdom...One day you will understand” (Aladdin, 2019). When she meets Aladdin for the first time, she even repeats the same line of her cartoon counterpart from the 1992 original, confessing that she feels “trapped,” like she “can’t escape what [she was] born into” (Aladdin, 2019). Later in the movie, when Jafar has ascended to the throne and become an all-powerful sorcerer, he hisses at Jasmine to “start doing what [she] should have done all along: stay silent” (Aladdin, 2019).

Of course, becoming sultan is indeed a more ambitious aspiration than finding a loving husband; Jasmine’s new goal is not centered around a man but herself as she pursues the realization of her own political prowess. But although this change may perhaps be a slight improvement from the 1992 version, it still adheres to the problematic template of the original. Primarily, Jasmine is constrained by the degenerate mandates of her Arab society—whether she is being forced into marriage or forbidden from becoming sultan.

And these portrayals fit directly into mainstream Orientalist representations of Arab women. Of course, Naomi Scott is an actress of South Asian descent (which I will discuss later in my paper), but she lives within a decidedly Arab-coded world. Amira Jarmakani asserts that “popular representations of Arab and Muslim womanhood serve to circumscribe them within a totalizing shroud of silence and oppression” and that “Arab women are perceived to be silent and submissive” (Jarmakani, 2011). Jasmine’s song, which seems to have been directly influenced by these Orientalist perspectives, is actually called “Speechless.” She bewails that her voice has been “drowned out in the thunder” but, nevertheless, insists that she “won’t go speechless—speechless!” (Aladdin, 2019).

In addition, Jasmine’s supposed inability to assume political power perpetuates the conception that Middle Eastern and Islamic societies are fossilized in the past. Naber explicates that “[i]n Orientalist thought, Muslims, Arabs, and other ‘Orientals’ are hopelessly mired in a host of social ills, the cause of which is an unchanging tradition that exists outside of history and is incompatible with civilization” (Naber, 2011). Evelyn Asultany, in her article “Stealth Muslim,” similarly elucidates that Islamic culture—and by extension Middle Eastern culture—are seen as “inherently...static” and “unchanging” (Asultany, 2011). From the Western and Orientalist point of view, the Middle East is wholly antagonistic to modernity, perpetually suspended in a state of stagnant traditionality.

And Agrabah is no exception; Jasmine’s father and Jafar harbor patriarchal worldviews, convinced that the princess is not fit to rule because she is a woman. After Jasmine implores her father to consider appointing her as sultan, he promptly refuses because “it has never been done in the 1,000-year history” (Aladdin, 2019)—in other words, a female political leader would simply be too radical within the antiquated constraints of Agrabah society. In her first performance of “Speechless” during the movie, she croons: “Written in stone, every rule every word, centuries old and unbending. ‘Stay in your place better seen and not heard.’ Well, now that story is ending” (Aladdin, 2019). The rules are “centuries old” and “unbending,” meaning they are patriarchal and therefore anachronistic to the “feminist” convictions of modern-day viewers. Just like her animated character from over a decade ago, Jasmine is at odds with the conservative traditions of her culture, which, as the audience members can clearly see, are regressive and prejudicial.

And Arab and Muslim women such as Jasmine—who are terribly oppressed by the “indigenous (hyper)patriarchy” of their society (Jarmakani, 2011)—always “need to be saved by American heroes” (Naber. 2011). In the original film, Aladdin represents Euro-American ideals that rescue Jasmine from her dire condition. Erin Addison in her 1993 article “Saving Other Women from Other Men: Disney’s Aladdin” contends:

Aladdin is a thinly disguised American entrepreneur: he meets Jasmine, his Arab futurewife, in the marketplace, dazzles her with magic wealth and a movie-star smile, and frees her from Arab men, Arab (Islamic) law, and Arab culture. In the bargain, Aladdin/America becomes the heir designate to Agrabah/Arabia and its marketplace. Disparaged Islam, manned by Jafar and the daffy Sultan, becomes the whollyunsympathetic antagonist in its own land. Jasmine, the Arab woman, is the locus at which the colonial catalysis occurs, through whom the narratives of naive individualism, romance, and secularism pass into and unravel the fabric of Islamic culture. To save Jasmine from her own culture, Aladdin dismembers that culture and replaces it with ours. (Addison, 1993)

The 2019 version, in essence, simply replaces Aladdin with Jasmine as this embodiment of Western saviorism. She frees herself from “Arab men, Arab (Islamic) law, and Arab culture” (Addison, 1993) which, according to the lyrics of “Speechless,” try to “shut [her] or cut [her] down” (Aladdin, 2019). She challenges this societal despotism by embracing Western feminism, which means fighting to ascend to her rightful place as sultan.

The 1992 Aladdin, although it presumably takes place in the Middle East, features an Orientalist miscellany of various Eastern cultures. The movie, for example, opens with the song “Arabian Nights,” overtly situating its characters within the Arab world where the “caravan camels roam” and the “winds from the East” meet the “suns from the West” (Aladdin, 2019). The mysterious narrator melismatically warbles the opening song in a manner that sounds vaguely similar to classic Arab music, greets his viewers with the Arabic salutation “salaam,” and tries to sell them a hookah, a smoking pipe found throughout Arabic-speaking regions (Aladdin, 1992). Aladdin and his pet monkey Abu even wear a red tarboosh (Aladdin, 2019), a cylindrical hat donned by Arab men. But in the song “Friend Like Me,” Genie calls Aladdin a “shah,” the title specifically given to political leaders in Iran. And the Sultan’s gold-domed royal palace looks strikingly similar to the Taj Mahal, an Indian mausoleum in the city of Agra, while Jasmine’s pet tiger has the South Asian name of “Rajah” (Aladdin, 1992). In fact, in a New York Times interview, Aladdin actor Mena Massoud describes Agrabah as “a fictional place that’s a culmination of India and Asia and the Middle East” (Aridi, 2019).

This disorderly hodgepodge of Eastern cultures reflects Orientalist conceptions of the “other.” In his groundbreaking 1978 book entitled Orientalism, Edward Said writes that the Orient is a “stage on which the whole East is confined” (Said, 1978), regardless of the significant cultural dissimilarities that differentiate these Eastern regions from one another. The “locales, regions, geographical sectors” of the Orient are “man-made” because Orientalism is a “British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands” (Said, 1978). Clustered under the overarching label of the “Orient,” therefore, are “Arabs and Islam” as well as “India, Japan, China, and other sections of the Far East” (Said, 1978). The problem with this arbitrary amalgamation, however, is that it is plainly inaccurate; these regions have completely distinct histories, languages, customs, and identities.

The casting of Jasmine in the new Aladdin film maintains the homogenizing Orientalism of the original. Naomi Scott, who plays the princess in the 2019 remake, is an actress of South Asian descent; her father is English and her mother is Indian Gujrati (from the western region of Gujarat). Mena Massoud, on the other hand, who plays the lead as Aladdin, is an Arab-Canadian actor of Coptic Egyptian descent. Rather than attempt to create a film with clearly Arab characters or South Asian characters, Guy Ritchie and the writers and creators chose once again to construct an ambiguously composite Oriental world. And this decision implicity sends the message that all brown people are the same, regardless of where they are from.

Ritchie justifies this choice by claiming that Aladdin is “a human story that is not specific to any particular culture in the sense that all men and women have to wrestle with the issue of where they find their identity...The colors by which we painted that story just happened to be Middle Eastern” (Patches, 2019).

But the characters do not just “happe[n]” to be Middle Eastern. The film is steeped in the folklore and culture of the region—or at least a caricature of it—and is replete with sultans, sorcerers, magic carpets, camels, and bustling bazaars. Jafaar embodies the stereotype of the salacious Arab man with thick, angular eyebrows, kohl-lined eyes, a hooked nose, and greasy goatee. Jasmine is the oppressed Arab woman who needs to be saved. Aladdin, in other words, is loudly Middle Eastern (or at least Middle Eastern adjacent). And so who the creators decide to cast in the story matters.

In Sarah E. Turner’s essay “Blackness, Bayous, and Gumbo: Encoding and Decoding Race in a Colorblind World,” she discusses how Tiana in Princess in the Frog is similarly intended to be a colorblind character: “while Princess Tiana is clearly black, that is not the point of the text— she is simply a princess who ‘happens’ to have black skin but is not representational of blackness or racially-prescribed tropes...Tiana is “just a princess,” not a black princess” (Turner, 2012). In similar ways, Jasmine was simply cast to, as Turner puts it “diversify [Disney’s] offerings” (Turner, 2012)—almost as if to fulfill an unspoken inclusivity quota to draw people to the theaters. In a Vox interview Guy Ritchie even mentions that he took “great care” to put together an ethnically diverse cast (Romano, 2019). Viewers are supposed to both acknowledge her racial identity (and therefore acknowledge Disney’s ostensibly progressive casting) as well as ignore her racial identity, just enough so that her being South Asian in an Arab world does not matter.

But the problem with this paradoxical representation is that it fails to acknowledge the obvious. Naomi Scott being of Indian descent does, in fact matter; there is no such thing as a colorblind lens. Just as Tiana’s blackness is “clearly intrinsic to both ‘who’ and ‘what’ she is” (Turner, 2012), Jasmine’s Arabness/Middle Eastern-ness/otherness is as well. And casting a South Asian actress in her role flagrantly ignores this fact. Instead, it assumes that an Arab woman is the same as a South Asian woman is the same as any brown woman, which is an inherently Orientalist notion.

Although mainstream audiences lauded the new Princess Jasmine in Disney’s 2019 reboot of Aladdin as “modern-day” and progressive, both the character change and the casting of South Asian actress in her role retain the troubling Orientalist themes of the original film. Although she now wants a place on the throne instead of a ring on her finger, Jasmine is still helplessly subjugated by her own patriarchal society and the despotic men who live within in. And although Jasmine lives in Agrabah, a presumably Arab land, she is played by Naomi Scott, a South Asian actress, indicating that all “Oriental” women are the same and therefore interchangeable. And although I only discuss Jasmine’s character in this paper, there is much more fodder with which to demonstrate the deep-seated Orientalism of both the 1992 and 2019 versions.

Even though Aladdin is just a children’s movie, the kinds of characters and stories Disney creates and displays on the silver screen is important. As Jonathan Cheu mentions in his book Diversity in Disney Films, Disney has the “reach and impact” to shape “our global citizenry” (Cheu, 2012). Representation matters, but also how we represent matters. In other words, I think it is high time to move beyond culturally composite lands, jesting genies, and persecuted princesses.