Page 130 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Cultural Imper al sm and Hybr d ty | 10

how to read donald ducK
How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was a seminal study
by Latin American author Ariel Dorfman and European scholar Armand Mattelart. First pub-
lished in Chile in 1971, the book was an analysis of popular U.S. comic books that were sold
in Spanish translation in Latin America. These comics contained stories set in imaginary third-
world countries such as “Aztecland,” and depicted the natives of these lands as backward
savages. In one comic book Donald Duck goes to Africa, where the inhabitants are happy to
trade their valuables for trinkets because they are in awe of the trappings of “civilization.”
Reading between the lines, Dorfman and Mattelart found messages of corporate capitalist
ideology and native inferiority that they argued would influence Latin American readers of
these comics to discard their own values and identities and accept U.S dominance.

armed force and occupation to achieve their political and economic goals.
In this view, cultural products can smooth the way for domination by expos-
ing people to products they may desire, the values that are seen to accompany
those products, and ultimately even new sources of allegiance. In short, the cul-
tural imperialism argument is that if people in other countries consume a lot of
U.S. television shows, films, and other media products, they are likely to forget
or reject their own cultural roots and instead try to emulate the characters and
practices they are exposed to through imported media.
In Mass Communication and American Empire, well-known media scholar
Herbert Schiller argued that the United States was extending its already size-
able power through economic dominance of other countries’ communications
systems and through the cultural influence carried by exported media. With
this book Schiller set forth a fundamental claim that cultural imperialism con-
stituted a threat to traditional cultures. Schiller went on to argue that the mass
media were the principal vehicles for promoting Western values, and that the
U.S. government and business sectors were deliberately attempting to mold
developing countries’ values and institutions to benefit U.S. objectives.
The term cultural imperialism carries with it certain assumptions about the
relationship between the developed and developing worlds. It follows Immanuel
Wallerstein’s world systems model that places the developed countries in the
center, dominating the peripheral nonindustrialized countries in ways that do
not allow those countries to develop independently. Cultural imperialism also
draws from dependency theory, which states that underdevelopment has not
been simply a matter of some countries progressing more slowly than others, as
some have suggested, but rather that the developed countries derive economic
benefits from this unbalanced relationship.

onE-way FLows

Analysis of the global trade in entertainment products confirms that the
United States has been the world’s principal exporter of films and television
programs, while importing very little. The recognition of this “one-way flow” of