Current Issues in Tourism
Editor: C. Michael Hall (Department of Management, College of Business and Economics, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand) and Chris Cooper (Foundation Professor of Tourism, University of Queensland, Australia) Michael and Chris are joint editor of the book series Aspects of Tourism. Reviews Editor John Jenkins (University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia)
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Volume: 1 Number: 1 Page: 58–119
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Disney and Commodity Aesthetics: A Critique of Fjellman's Analysis of 'Distory' and the 'Historicide' of the Past
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Keith Hollinshead
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This paper offers a critique of the theoretical insight on representation and signification in the making of culture which is contained within Stephen Fjellman's work on commodification Vinyl Leaves: Walt
Disney World and America - a book which strangely is not yet frequently cited in the literature of cultural tourism or heritage tourism research. The first part of this study of the appropriation of history/heritage/culture
is an analysis of how Fjellman in general seeks to expose atWalt Disney World (Florida), not only the technical and kinematic brilliance of the Disney companies, but also the entrepreneurial violence they
engage in as they colonise much of human life and human and natural history in America through the clever positioning and reinforcement of their preferred commodity forms. In the second part of the critique,
particular attention is turned to what Fjellman sees as the clever and creative techno-corporate ways in which the Disney companies capture narratives in history/heritage/culture and decontextualise or
reduce them via preferred forms of 'distory' which cleverly match their own national and transnational corporativist interests. An attempt is thereby made to draw out, label, and interpret (for tourism
researchers), ten major theses on signification in culture by which Fjellman delineates the power of distory (i.e. of the Disney style of repackaged history) to subjugate or to otherwise repackage received
history in such corporativist representations of heritage tourism.
© Channel View Publications
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