The politics of constructing counternarratives against Orientalism in popular media reception: the case of Mulan (2020)

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ABSTRACT This article investigates into Orientalism in Disney’s Caro, Niki, dir. 2020. Mulan. Orlando, FL: The Walt Disney Company. and its resistant reading on Chinese social media platform Douban. It adopts a qualitative method to discipline data collected from Douban, then analyzing them in light of Stuart Hall’s articulation theory and Henry Jenkins’ ‘collective intelligence’. The analysis first reveals two ‘articulated’ Orientalist discourses in the film undergirded by a form of ‘new racism’, which serves to perpetuate the existing racial and gender hierarchies in the West–East power matrix. Then it shows how Douban users’ collective intelligence can potentially ‘disarticulate’ and ‘rearticulate’ Orientalism through a kind of microphysical, collective rewriting. The research argues that both disarticulation and rearticulation are a means by which Douban users indulge the civic imagination for alternative geopolitics in popular culture representation; compared with disarticulation, their rearticulatory practice is less effectual due to the inclusion of self-conflicting discursive elements, which ironically lay bare traces of their own discursive formation. This irony, this article suggests, calls into question the dominant-resistant binary paradigm that predominates current media reception studies. The article concludes by rethinking Orientalism and its Douban resistance in light of ‘Chineseness as identity work’, which deconstructs the oppositional paradigm and enlightens Orientalist film studies in global contexts.