Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dispossession by Ducks: The Imperialist Treasure Hunt in Southeast Asia

1990; College Art Association; Volume: 49; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00043249.1990.10792682

2325-5307

David Kunzle,

Media, Gender, and Advertising

Walt Disney's is the representative mass culture of late capitalism, and the Walt Disney Duck comics, which flourished in the twenty years following World War II, are arguably the representative, most realistic, and best children's comics of the era. They are also the most widely distributed internationally, appearing by the 1970s in eighteen different languages and fifty countries. The postwar years saw a massive expansion of U.S. economic, military, and cultural power that was more or less unquestioned at home, though increasingly resisted abroad. The foreign challenge to U.S. hegemony was met with military force, economic sanctions, and the exportation to Third World countries of U.S. capitalist values and artifacts, even as the culture of those countries was appropriated by means anthropological, ethnographic, artistic, touristic, etc. In this two-way process of cultural absorption, the simultaneous application of economic and military pressure was designed to ensure that the cultural values of the metropolitan United States predominated. The Disney comics, indeed, incorporate that strategy more succinctly and transparently than any comparable cultural phenomenon.