How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic | Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart

First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves.
 
Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism in Chile, the book examines how Disney products reflect capitalist ideology, and are active agents working in this ideology’s favor. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalized and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World.
 
A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman in which he writes:
 
"It is that joy in liberation, that alegria, that spirit of resistance, that I wish to share with America, as the book that Pinochet’s soldiers could not liquidate or Disney’s lawyers stop from entering the United States finally finds its way to its new home, deep into the land that invented Donald Duck and Donald Trump. Is the same country that gave me such a warm welcome as a child, and perhaps may now equally greet with open arms this critique of oppression and it certainty that we don’t have to leave the world as it was when we first encountered it."

About the Author

Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American author born in Argentina, whose books have been published in over fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His novels, poetry, essays, plays, stories and screenplays have won numerous awards. Among his works are the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels Widows and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His most recent books are a collection of essays, Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages from the End of the World and the forthcoming novel, Darwin’s Ghosts. He contributes to major papers worldwide, including frequent contributions to The New York Times and the New York Review of Books Daily. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, Index on Censorship and many other magazines and journals. A prominent human rights activist, he lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.