Professor Chin's lecture will look at the ways in which Disney’s Mulan is a vehicle for embedded discourses of race that have long plagued the United States; as such it at once draws from deeply ingrained cultural histories, while re-fashioning them for new generations. The talk will focus specifically on how Disney's Mulan projects U.S. racial categories into the way in which it imagines Dynastic China, the question of Eddie Murphy's vocal performance as MuShu the dragon, and consider the complications involved when white adoptive parents of Chinese girls hold up Disney's Mulan to them as a cultural role model. The problem with Mulan is not so much Disney’s failed multiculturalism as it is the persistence of racial hierarchies and racism (in all its guises) more generally. Ultimately, then, Disney’s Mulan is a symptom of that much larger national dilemma.

Elizabeth Chin is Visiting Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Duke and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her book Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture (U of Minnesota Press, 2001) was a finalist for the C. Wright Mills prize given annually by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her research interests are in the anthropology of children and childhood, consumption, and race. Elizabeth also does work on Haitian folkloric dance.