Introduction

Abstract

For Chile, 1971 was a year of effervescent social and political transformation. The Popular Unity government, under the presidency of Salvador Allende, had just come to power, and the possibilities of a peaceful transition to socialism seemed both realistic and desirable to a healthy plurality of Chileans. Writing in this moment of historical transformations, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart published a book which is probably the best-known example of communications scholarship produced in Chile: How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. Their book combines semiological analyses of the Disney comics that were widely available and read in Chile with an analysis of Chile’s dependent position in the global political economy to show how the discourse of these comics provides cultural props for imperialism.¹ The book has been one of the most widely read works of social science produced in the Third World, having been translated into numerous languages and distributed virtually all over the world — moving against the usual current of international cultural and scientific influence. It has also been intensely controversial.² Whatever one makes of the analyses of Dorfman and Mattelart, the book — that is to say, the struggle against Donald Duck — was clearly the product of a broadly-based cultural and political struggle in Chile against imperialism.