Was Donald Duck always such a crass agent of cultural imperialism?
Indeed he was, say Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. Their 1971 book How to Read Donald Duck (published in Chile as Para Leer al Pato Donald) examined the myriad ways Disney cartoons did the dirty work of their capitalist creators.
The book was an instant success, and when a CIA-backed coup overthrew the democratically-elected Socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973, installing Augusto Pinochet in a military dictatorship, it posed an instant threat to the regime.
In Chile, copies were burned and dumped en masse into the ocean; in the United States, books were impounded at the border. No publisher has dared face down Disney, and How to Read Donald Duck has been effectively banned in the U.S. ever since.
Here, available for the first time through an American publisher, is one of the most influential works of cultural criticism of all time.
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