Peripheral Post III -JAE-

 *Disclaimer* Nothing polished, or fully formed, over here to be found once more.

Recently, on a podcast, I heard BD Wong discuss the reason why Disney hired Donny Osmond to sing Shang Li’s lines in Mulan instead of Wong who voices Shang Li’s spoken dialogue. This is not the first occurrence of Disney hiring additional singing talent, or even recording multiple versions of a single song. But BD Wong is a tony award winning Broadway performer, and recorded a full version of Li Shang’s signature “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” Wong, on the Las Culturistas podcast, shared that he was fired from the singing role because Disney asserted that “Donny Osmond’s singing voice sounded more like BD’s than BD’s does.” BD, alongside the podcast hosts Bowen Yang (Saturday Night Live) and Matthew Rogers (Haute Dog, HBO), discussed how Disney may have thought having a famous white singer’s name attached to the song would carry more weight than an Asian performer. Much like how Christina Aguilera’s version of “Reflection” in Mulan was recorded after Lea Salonga’s original version, and became the default for Mulan’s promotional campaign.           

These events remain poignant as scholars, content creators, and corporate executives debate the aspects of power (capital, cultural, societal) located in diverse ethnic, gender, disability, age, sexuality and other casting criteria. Representation is important, especially when it isn’t superficial and empty. My question is what kind of abstractions can we make, in the fashion of Margaret Morse, to perform a postmodern, postcolonial, or post-structural reading of the phenomena of yellowface, blackface, and other disallowances of authentic representation? These concerns, to me, are even more pressing due to the longstanding history of stereotypical, superficial, and at times flat out racist attempts of representing non-white and non-middle class experiences across media. All of this in addition to the blooming archives of media made by community insiders for their communities, as well as minority led commercial projects invested in expanding the canons of diversities. 

Anyway, these are just some of the seedlings and shards of potentially rewarding pursuits that were swimming around in my mind this week.