Cold War Caricatures: Topaze, Hunger and the Politics of Poverty in 1960s Chile
2017; CIESPAL; Volume: 46; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-4247
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural and Social Studies in Latin America
ResumoIn their seminal book Para leer al pato Donald: comunicacion de masa y colonialismo (1972), Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart identify an aesthetics of hunger as a key aspect of the popular culture that should have been developed during Salvador Allende's nascent Popular Unity government. Criticizing Disney's highly popular comic books for constructing a fantasy world in which characters like Donald Duck nunca manifiestafn] problemas con arriendo, con luz, con alimento, con vestuario (101) and where [el] hambre, como una vieja peste, ha sido superada (101-02), Dorfman and Mattelart advocate for the creation of [un] representante autentico del trabajador contemporaneo (107), a new visual image to accompany the new national culture coming into being. Imagining Donald's comic replacement as one who could not be disentagled from efectos [del hambre cronica] en desarrollo corporal y mental en los seres humanos (102) and who would make manifest la muerte de millones por falta de alimento (102), these critics suggest that [la] y su eco se esfumaran para dejar lugar a una mueca (159). the face of hunger in Chile that, once exposed through macabre humor, would enable the construction of Allende's Chilean Path to Socialism. This essay interrogates these Utopian claims for the revolutionary potential of comic visual depictions of hunger and misery within the popular culture of Cold War Chile. It does so not by examining the portraits of poverty presented by Popular Unity's cultural production but rather by analyzing politically neutral publications that came to an end with Allende's electoral victory. More specifically, this essay will examine the pages of el semanario de humor mas leido de Santiago (Salinas 389), Topaze: et barometro de chilena (1931-70) and its depictions of the hunger, malnutrition and poverty suffered by its icon, Juan Verdejo. Unlike Donald Duck's North American and commercial origins. Verdejo es [en su origen] un personaje de poesia popular [chilena], emerging from the experience of pobres mas desprotegidos (Montealegre Iturra 118) and serving as la representacion colectiva del pueblo chileno (Salinas and Silva 25). (1) Topaze's image of Verdejo, however, was not created by the country's increasingly mobilized working-class communities but instead by the anticommunist cartoonist and filmmaker Coke (Jorge Delano). Yet though the magazine openly and mercilessly critiqued figures on the national and international left. Topaze also gleefully skewered conservative politicians, articulating what Jorge Montealegre has termed [una] aparente neutralidad politica (Montealegre Iturra 118), which placed the blame for Verdejo's suffering on the entirety of Chile's dysfunctional political, cultural and economic system. Although the link Topaze establishes between neutrality and the comedy surrounding Verdejo's emaciated image complicates Dorfman and Mattelart's claims for the existence of a natural link between comic visual depictions of hunger and the revolutionary potential for social transformation, this essay argues that Topaze's hunger humor during the 1960s clearly crystallizes the challenge faced in Popular Unity Chile by those attempting to mobilize political humor: how to articulate as comedy the persistent and tragic realities of hunger in a way that could navigate between Disney's risa fantastica (Dorfman and Mattelart 159), which denies the existence of poverty, and a carnivalesque laughter motivated by the unrealized future abundance promised by Allende's revolucion con empanadas y vino tinto. As Maximiliano Salinas points out in his essay anthology. El Chile de Juan Verdejo (2011), Topaze, during the 1960s, was characterized by dual comedie orientations that were as incongruous as those posed by Disney and Allende in the 1970s, an unresolved tension between what he calls la jerarquica (Salinas 190) and a laughter born of [un] mundo carnavalesco (Salinas 439). …
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