Content area
Full Text
"The paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept of dominant and subordinate cultures . . . and fails to recognize that the existence of racism relates to the possession and exercise of politico-economic control and authority."
-Hazel Carby, "Multiculture"1
At first glance, Shrek the Musical, DreamWorks Theatricals' first offering, and Barack Obama, the forty-fourth president of the United States, appear to have little in common. It may be purely coincidental that Shrek opened on Broadway in December 2008, between Obama's election in November 2008 and his inauguration in January 2009, events that at least one self-styled progressive said "would mean the end of racism in America."2 We believe, however, that the musical's advocacy of tolerance and celebration of cultural diversity made its arrival timely. Its climactic number, "Freak Flag," represents nothing less than an anthem of multiculturalism: "All the things that make us special / are the things that make us strong!"3 Yet many argue that multiculturalism is far less radical than it might seem. Walter Benn Michaels, for example, contends that it backs away from militating for structural change by redefining "the opposition to discrimination as the appreciation (rather than the elimination) of difference."4 Because it is predicated on the aesthetic contemplation of diversity rather than the struggle against racialized subordination, multiculturalism represents what Hazel Carby calls a "supermarket" theory that imagines the individual consumption of "difference" to be a cure for social ills.5 Examining Shrek's message, and the divergence between that message and the blatant racial stereotyping of Donkey, Shrek's "jive-spouting sidekick," 6 we could almost believe it was designed to epitomize the contradictions that disrupt the paradigm of racial diversity in the early twenty-first-century marketplace. Crucially, these contradictions are also exemplified at the highest levels of political discourse in the United States, in the debates and controversies about racial identity that have shadowed Obama since he entered the national political arena at the 2004 Democratic national convention.
In this essay, we aim to study how DreamWorks has branded Shrek the Musical as a celebration of diversity and to link it to the branding of Barack Obama. We argue not that "brand Shrek" is an analogy for "brand Obama," but that both serve as contemporaneous examples of the same problematic claims. We believe,...