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companies often have had an active investment in
what
becomes remediated. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin defined “remediation” as a process whereby newer media re-represent and re-produce older media, and vice versa. Grusin and Bolter discuss how emergent media such as the Internet, digital photography, and video games fit within a history of media studies that goes back to television’s recycling of film, film’s adapting of literature, and so forth. In the age of convergence, newer media today are neither ahistorical nor unique to our current historical moment. Moreover, different media remain in tension with one another, regardless of which form they assume. “The new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are minimized,” write Grusin and Bolter. “The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways.” 35 Content migrates from platform to platform as various media appropriate and rearrange preexisting forms, while older media can in turn remediate newer ones (such as a short story about going to the movies, or a film about the Internet, and so forth). What results is a detailed web of remediation that stretches across the history of modern media formations and practices. And there remains the need for a closer look at the cultural implications of this otherwise-standard industrial and aesthetic practice.
    Remediation is never a politically or culturally neutral act, any more than it is a purely aesthetic one. Any number of reasons influence why a major corporation repurposes older intellectual property the way that it does (or doesn’t). For instance, Disney found numerous profitable avenues for recycling
Song of the South
in ways that rarely ever recirculated the film uncritically, whether as a television episode, children’s book, or theme park ride. Instead, they strategically remediate only the least offensive parts of
Song of the South
for further profit, such as the recent pop star Miley Cyrus (aka “Hannah Montana”) doing a seemingly innocuous cover of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” The company, both embracing and resisting its valuable but problematic property, carefully reused selective parts of the film in other media platforms. The result is transmedia dissipation, where intellectual property diffuses across the dispersed texts of media convergence culture. Over the course of several decades, Disney’s corporate strategy scattered
Song of the South
in fragments as much as it expanded the film’s narrative universe.
    The persistence of such images across platform transitions is a point often less examined by new media scholars and critical race theorists. The former’s focus on being technologically timely can create the effect of ahistoricism. Meanwhile, the latter offer detailed critiques of problematic texts and moments of reception, but they can miss a film’s resiliency through both remediation and recirculation. Since nostalgia is such a dominant feature in remediation, racist images from the past will often follow. Svetlana Boym noted that nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” 36 The comfort of appealing to the past, she argues, naturalizes the volatility of technological change in modern society. At the heart of shifts in newer media platforms, ironically, are often nostalgic appeals back to older existing properties, even racist ones, for a sense of aesthetic reassurance and creative stability within the new medium’s unfamiliarity. For example,
Amos ’n’ Andy
was a popular 1920s radio show featuring two laughably incompetent black characters (voiced by white men), who provided comic relief to large, white and black audiences. It reinforced the “coon” stereotype of African Americans as