ABSTRACT
In 1951, composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein produced their Broadway hit The King and I, a musical that would be adapted into a Hollywood film by Walter Lang in 1956. Almost half a century later, in 1999, Andy Tennant, revisited the story and readapted it for the screen it as Anna and the King. Drawing on Bakhtin’s ‘monologism’ and ‘heteroglossia’ as well as Roland Barthes’ ‘reality effect’, this chapter argues that Anna and the King, Andy Tennant’s 1999 remake of the iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein 1956 musical The King and I, far from ringing the death knell of Orientalism, as the director intended, has inspired a new trend in twenty-first century neocolonialism, which Hollywood, through the commodified employment of a particularly controversial form of feminism, seeks to pass off as progressive, all the while erasing the deleterious effects of colonialism in Asia. Along the same lines, it equally posits that Hollywood’s recent obsession with the ‘Golden 50s’ proffered the spread of a cinematic style meant to transform what was heretofore accepted as historical fiction or fiction ‘based on a true story’ into incontestable ‘historical reality’. This amounts not only to a recycling of Hollywood’s Orientalist heritage at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but to a straightforward rewriting of colonial history.
