New Jungle Book Film Revives Kipling’s Racist Work

FEATURING STEPHANIE ABRAHAM – Disney’s new film The Jungle Book is drawing rave reviews for its computer generated graphics and realistic looking animal characters. The storyline, if you’re not familiar with it, is that a baby boy is abandoned in the jungles of India and raised by a panther, a bear, and other animals. The boy, Mowgli, struggles to find his place in the animal kingdom.

Disney has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into a film that stars high profile actors like Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, and Idris Elba. But what most reviewers are not telling you is that the studio’s remake of its 1967 cartoon classic is based on an 1899 story by Rudyard Kipling, an apologist for British colonialism in India.

Read Stephanie’s work at www.StephanieAbraham.com.

Stephanie Abraham, Arab-American writer and media critic, she helped found the feminist magazine make/shift and was the founding editor of the feminist magazine LOUDmouth. She is the Pop Culture Correspondent and Film Critic for Rising Up With Sonali.