The Empire's Old Clothes

"Of all these books, this one is probably the most fun. I chose it because a famous, earlier work by Dorfman on the same theme, How to Read Donald Duck , is no longer available. Ariel Dorfman is one of the leading literary figures in Latin America today. This book is a collection of early essays from the 1970s; this English version was published in the 1980s. It’s one of the founding works in the study of cultural imperialism and cultural hegemony. Dorfman deconstructs Donald Duck, Babar the Elephant and the Lone Ranger. He shows how the values conveyed through these stories reinforced the basic structures of the cultural, social and political status quo. Not only do they underpin the values of stability and capitalism within Latin America, they also justify and legitimise the United States’s dominance over it. In that sense, it sits very well with Scholtz’s Beneath the United States , my first choice. Through the prism of popular children’s literature, Dorfman shows how the assumptions of American superiority, hegemony and benevolence are reproduced from one generation to the next."