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(Professor Johnson Cheu, Michigan State University)

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(Professor Pushpa Parekh, Spelman College)

In 2003 Brenda Ayres published The Emperor's Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney's Magic Kingdom with Peter Lang. The contributors to its collection of essays argued that although the Disney Company had been making attempts to represent multicultural diversity, it persisted in inculcating insidious racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes. Nearly twenty years have passed since that analysis, and current scholars-many of them young and non-Western-are assessing more recent Disney films and finding them to be more inclusive, tolerant, and affirmative than previous works from the magic kingdom. The appraisal of Disney entertainment in the twenty-first century is the focus of the thirteen chapters by scholarly contributors from around the globe, finding it to be more inclusive, tolerant, and affirmative of multiple cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, and gender as well as the differently abled and mentally challenged. The analysis also suggests what Disney might yet do to promote peace, harmony, and wellbeing in a world that desperately needs to learn how to get along with others.