Rural as Racialized Plantation vs Rural as Modern Reconnection: Blackness and Agency in Disney’s Song of the South and The Princess and the Frog

Abstract

The plantation trope in the American minstrelsy tradition reflected simultaneously competing and complementary representations of the rural ideal and racialized African American characters. This trope longed for an earlier and simpler time with strange embodiments of African Americans, and persisted for decades. Disney’s Song of the South draws extensively on these competing idealizations of the pastoral and the African American. In contrast, Disney’s The Princess and the Frog draws on a broad pastoral trope wherein the rural ideal provides a place for characters to reconnect with their true selves and change their lives for the better. While the 1946 film casts African Americans as comforting the white man in distress, the 2009 film casts African Americans as their own agents of positive change.