Armand Mattelart Research Articles

Mickey Marx

Mickey Marx Devin Thomas O’Shea (bio) How to Read Donald Duck, Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart OR Books www.orbooks.com/catalog/donald-duck/ 208 Pages; Print, $22.00 The dictator Augusto Pinochet had this book burned in the streets of Chile after the 1973 September 11th coup d’ état — a coup that was funded, planned, and encouraged in secret by the United States. Since then, a copy has been hard to find. The English translation took a long while to make it state-side, and if you’re familiar with Disney’s attitude towards intellectual property, it’s a miracle that How to Read Donald Duck was able to print Disney comics in its pages. After years of scarcity, OR Books has brought this critique of American cartoons as propaganda to English readers. Even if this is your first foray into Marxist criticism, Dorfman and Mattelart’s critique is fun, concise, and sharp as a knife. How to Read Donald Duck is essentially a Marxist critique of children’s literature. Disney comics flooded Latin America alongside US influence throughout the twentieth century. During that time, Scrooge McDuck’s gold vault swimming pool was made to look like a modest savings compared to the exploitative practices of US companies aided by the US government. For Dorfman and Mattelart, the ideological groundwork for this imperialist exploitation is contained and represented within Donald Duck and the cast of Disney characters that compose Walt Disney’s comic book canon. How to Read Donald Duck is not addressing Disney movies overall, but the archetypes as they appeared in comic form. With beautiful flourishes of language, it is difficult to convey what a rare perspective it is to get two authors collaborating to make a convincing case that everything evil about US imperialism is reflected in a three-panel comic about Jiminy Cricket chased by vultures named Marx and Hegel. It might seem silly, or absurd, to make such serious claims about Disney cartoons, but the authors defend their study with a mix of self-deprecation and serious psychology. Doesn’t it make sense that ideological propaganda would show itself plainly in childhood media? Disney cartoons often count as the first morality tales a child learns, so shouldn’t we investigate what they’re saying? Shouldn’t [End Page 20] we be concerned if there an “iron fist beneath the Mouse’s glove?” One high-water mark of the book came when Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, are revealed to be products of art in the age of mechanical reproduction; they are time-saving stamps. Each nephew is identical except for the colors of their caps. These colors change their being. Maybe that’s why Disney’s family tree is so full of twins and triplets, but according to Dorfman and Mattelart, this represents an affect that Disney wants us to receive; Disney wants us running on the treadmill. In the comics, everything needs to be in motion while having nothing ever really change. Fortunes won or lost, there is no class or social movement in Disney’s world. Each nephew is put in motion, but nothing really changes; technicolor printing allows one to become three like a Boy Scout duckling hydra. How to Read Donald Duck uncovers a deeply conservative, patriarchal, agenda in the center of Micky Mouse’s heart; the female characters are always the girlfriends and bystanders of the male protagonists. All the characters are related indirectly; there are no mothers and fathers, only uncles and nephews. Therefore, the parental voice is absent and everywhere; it’s in the composition of the comics that we hear what the God of Disney wants to say. I appreciated the take-down of Scrooge particularly. On the surface, Scrooge is a criticism of capitalism within Disney’s world. Scrooge never spends a dime; he lives a shallow life in service of inanimate wealth. He is just like the Dicken’s character of his namesake. But with How to Read Donald Duck, we come to see that Scrooge is a decoy; a prop meant to disarm the reader...

Mickey, Marginality, and Mexico: Mariana Yampolsky’s Final Photographic Narrative

Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky’s final photography exhibition casts aside typical visualizations of her adopted country to foreground the marginal voices that react to global forces. Yampolsky’s photographic narrative engages directly with ideas promoted in Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s key work on cultural imperialism: How to Read Donald Duck. This analysis of her photographic text will show how Yampolsky’s visual representations of the subaltern provides further and distinct evidence of Dorfman and Mattelart’s assertions regarding the introduction of foreign symbols into a Latin American context. Additionally, her work demonstrates how the popular classes appropriate these symbols, adding to them mexicanidad and additional meaning created by the subaltern.

Diálogos y reflexiones sobre las comunicaciones en la Unidad Popular. Chile, 1970 -1973

El siguiente artículo analiza el debate que se gestó en torno a las comunicaciones durante la Unidad Popular. El Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Nacional (CEREN), de la Universidad Católica de Santiago, sentó un precedente en la constitución de nuevas propuestas -distintas a las dominantes- que posteriormente se transformaron en paradigmas de las comunicaciones. Armand Mattelart, Michèle Mattelart y Mabel Piccini, de hecho, abrieron el debate evidenciando y cuestionando la falta de visión de la izquierda en la materia. La falta de políticas comunicacionales emanadas desde el gobierno, de este modo, no impidió el desarrollo de nuevas experiencias en función del contexto revolucionario.

How to Read a Discipline

This article examines how critical concepts interact between disciplines as a measure of their priorities and possibilities. In particular, the critique focuses on the identity and identification processes of comparative literature and how these might be reconfigured, or remediated, by considering the logic of another discipline: in this case, media studies. The defining works I have in mind include “The Rhetoric of Temporality” by Paul de Man and, perhaps more controversially, the contemporaneous work of Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck. What we find are not the absolute differences of disciplinary procedures but certain grounds of comparison themselves: something that I believe is more than the subject of a historical inquiry alone.

Interview with Armand Mattelart

Interview with Armand Mattelart, June 7, 2012 Interview conducted by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, & Jim Cohen Interview translated by Jayson Harsin Interview edited by James Hay, Jayson Harsin, Jim Co...

The Real Future of the Media

When George Orwell encountered ideas of a technological utopia sixty-five years ago, he acted the grumpy middle-aged man: Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic “progressive” books, I was struck by the automatic way in which people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are “the abolition of distance” and “the disappearance of frontiers”. I do not know how often I have met with the statements that “the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance” and “all parts of the world are now interdependent” (1944).

A revista em quadrinhos Cabrochico e os debates culturais para a construção da “via chilena para o socialismo” (1971-1972)

O objetivo deste artigo e analisar o papel assumido pela cultura durante o governo socialista da Unidad Popular (UP) no Chile (1970-1973), enfatizando algumas iniciativas propostas pelo governo Allende envolvendo o universo infantil, em uma verdadeira luta pelos seus coracoes e mentes – e a estatizacao da editora Zig-Zag, que passa a se chamar Quimantu, caminha nessa direcao. A partir dela, iniciou-se uma verdadeira revolucao editorial, com a publicacao de muitos livros e materiais de propagandas, com tiragens elevadas e custo muito reduzido. Estimula-se tambem o lancamento de revistas em quadrinhos conectadas com as ideias da UP – dentre elas, Cabrochico, objeto deste artigo. Sua tentativa de desmistificar os conteudos que eram ate entao apresentados para as criancas, conectada com as conclusoes tiradas por Ariel Dorfman e Armand Mattelart em seu trabalho Para Leer Al Pato Donald (1971), porem, nao foi tao bem recebida pelos leitores chilenos, e gerou criticas, mudancas editoriais e, por fim, o encerramento da revista em dezembro de 1972. Procuramos aqui analisar algumas historias em quadrinhos nela publicadas, com enfase nas adaptacoes de conhecidos contos de fadas, cujos enredos foram modificados visando mostrar as contradicoes burguesas que estariam neles presentes, bem como apresentar novos valores nessas conhecidas historias para seus leitores. Procuramos enfatizar na analise alguns dos limites e possibilidades presentes na iniciativa editorial de Cabrochico e levantar alguns problemas a serem desenvolvidos em reflexoes ulteriores. Palavras-chave: quadrinhos (Unidad Popular), Quimantu, Cabrochico

Cinema e História: documentário de arquivo como lugar de memória

O artigo analisa a relação entre cinema e história considerando esse suporte como um 'lugar de memória'. Para isso, analisa-se o filme A Espiral (1975), dirigido por Chris Marker e Armand Mattelart, um documentário montado com materiais pesquisados em arquivos que se dedica a analisar a Unidade Popular no Chile. Após o golpe de Estado de 1973, seus realizadores pretenderam construir um conhecimento histórico que combatia a visão de que a ditadura 'normalizava' o caos instaurado no país, denunciando que o governo de Salvador Allende havia sido vítima de um grande boicote organizado pela direita. Nesse sentido, a montagem organiza um dossiê com base em 'provas' encontradas em arquivos.

Ariel Dorfman: an aesthetics of hope

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope is a critical introduction to the life and work of the internationally renowned writer, activist, and intellectual Ariel Dorfman. It is the first book about the author in English and the first in any language to address the full range of his writing to date. Consistently challenging assumptions and refusing preconceived categories, Dorfman has published in every major literary genre (novel, short story, poetry, drama); adopted literary forms including the picaresque, epic, noir, and theater of the absurd; and produced a vast amount of cultural criticism. His works are read as part of the Latin American literary canon, as examples of human rights literature, as meditations on exile and displacement, and within the tradition of bilingual, cross-cultural, and ethnic writing. Yet, as Sophia A. McClennen shows, when Dorfman's extensive writings are considered as an integrated whole, a cohesive aesthetic emerges, an aesthetics of hope that foregrounds the arts as vital to our understanding of the world and our struggles to change it. To illuminate Dorfman's thematic concerns, McClennen chronicles the writer's life, including his experiences working with Salvador Allende and his exile from Chile during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she provides a careful account of his literary and cultural influences. Tracing his literary career chronologically, McClennen interprets Dorfman's less-known texts alongside his most well-known works, which include How to Read Donald Duck, the pioneering critique of Western ideology and media culture co-authored with Armand Mattelart, and the award-winning play Death and the Maiden. In addition, McClennen provides two valuable appendices: a chronology documenting important dates and events in Dorfman's life, and a full bibliography of his work in English and in Spanish.

‘A worse importation than chewing gum’: American Influences on The Australian Press and Their Limits—The Australian Gallup Poll, 1941–1973

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

Beyond <i>Death and the Maiden</i>: Ariel Dorfman's Media Criticism and Journalism

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) is considered one of the most significant works of Latin American cultural criticism. Despite the significance of Donald Duck to the history of Latin American cultural criticism and to Dorfman's own trajectory as a writer, thus far, critical studies of Dorfman tend to gloss his essays, ignore his journalism, and focus solely on his literature, especially on his play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden) . While the attention to Death and the Maiden is certainly well founded, it is worth considering how these two works complement each other in Dorfman's career, given the apparent lack of a shared aesthetic between the playful cultural criticism of Donald Duck and the sparse language of Death and the Maiden . In fact, attending to Donald Duck and Dorfman's other nonfiction texts reveals the ways that he has worked across styles and genres on a series of central issues that form the core of his work. As a complement to research on Dorfman's literary production, this article focuses on his media criticism and his journalism, two areas of his work that have received the least critical attention, to suggest that Dorfman's literary production must be understood as part of a larger project, one that includes his essays, journalism, and other cultural activities.

Teoria crítica da informação no Brasil: a contribuição de Armand Mattelart

In this article we identify some of Armand Mattelart’s main ideas which offer possible approaches to issues addressed by information science. Special attention is given those of his ideas which are connected with the ideological analysis of informational materials and exposing inequities in the international flows of communication (connected with the cultural imperialism theory), and his criticism of the notion of “information society”. There are aspects in common between these ideas and those from the areas of “social information” and cultural action, in the field of Library and Information Studies and Information Science in Brazil. In conclusion, the author’s attitude as a critical thinking intellectual is highlighted. He is permanently opposing the figure of the positivist administrative scientist who focuses exclusively on technical issues and who seeks to resolve all tensions by developing technological apparatuses.

Teoria crítica da informação no Brasil: a contribuição de Armand Mattelart

In this article we identify some of Armand Mattelart’s main ideas which offer possible approaches to issues addressed by information science. Special attention is given those of his ideas which are connected with the ideological analysis of informational materials and exposing inequities in the international flows of communication (connected with the cultural imperialism theory), and his criticism of the notion of “information society”. There are aspects in common between these ideas and those from the areas of “social information” and cultural action, in the field of Library and Information Studies and Information Science in Brazil. In conclusion, the author’s attitude as a critical thinking intellectual is highlighted. He is permanently opposing the figure of the positivist administrative scientist who focuses exclusively on technical issues and who seeks to resolve all tensions by developing technological apparatuses.

Critical theory of information in Brazil: Armand Mattelart’s contribution

In this article we identify some of Armand Mattelart’s main ideas which offer possible approaches to issues addressed by information science. Special attention is given those of his ideas which are connected with the ideological analysis of informational materials and exposing inequities in the international flows of communication (connected with the cultural imperialism theory), and his criticism of the notion of “information society”. There are aspects in common between these ideas and those from the areas of “social information” and cultural action, in the field of Library and Information Studies and Information Science in Brazil. In conclusion, the author’s attitude as a critical thinking intellectual is highlighted. He is permanently opposing the figure of the positivist administrative scientist who focuses exclusively on technical issues and who seeks to resolve all tensions by developing technological apparatuses.

“Human Rights, Anyone?” Conceptions of Intellectual Labor after Noam Chomsky

This essay argues that the reception of Noam Chomsky's political scholarship by progressive academics demonstrates that the state of theory in the humanities has reached a point of crisis; that is, Chomsky's unpopularity in certain academic circles indicates that conceptions of intellectual labor have been radically reconfigured within the academy since the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the wake of much of his political writing about 9/11, an interesting phenomenon has emerged: Chomsky repels his onetime allies within progressive circles, while attracting more and more people among the general public to his point of view, providing an extremely interesting commentary on the state of intellectual labor in the academy. Chomsky's popular base seems to have expanded while his academic base has contracted. How can we account for these opposed tendencies? Is it that Chomsky has embarrassed “elite educated opinion” in a way that some can no longer tolerate? In “Crude Wars,” Timothy Brennan and Keya Ganguly write, “It has become fashionable for cultural critics to reject supposedly outmoded theories of political economy, to disdain the simple exposure of hidden agendas, to scoff at the likes of Noam Chomsky or Armand Mattelart on the grounds that their notions have been superseded by the ever-inventive strategies of the market.” To what within current conceptions of intellectual labor can we really attribute this tendency? It is this question to which my essay turns.

Armand Mattelart (Universidade Paris VIII/França): do Pato Donald ao McDonalds

Nesta entrevista, concedida por ocasião da sessão de autógafos do seu livro História da utopia planetária, Armand Mattelart, fala sobre as possibilidades utópicas de se resolver questões urgentes e o papel da comunicação na construção da história da humanidade.

Communications/excommunications: an interview with Armand Mattelart

This interview was conducted over the Internet between February and April 2006. Armand Mattelart is Emeritus Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. From 1962 to 1973 he was Professor of Sociology of Population and Communication at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, and United Nations expert in social development. During the Popular Unity period (1970–73), he worked with the Government of President Salvador Allende until the military coup of September 1973, when he was expelled from Chile. Between 1975 and 1982, he taught at the University of Paris VII and Paris VIII, and, between 1983 and 1997, as founding member of the Communications Department at the University of Rennes 2 (Haute-Bretagne). He has carried out numerous research and teaching missions in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. His research interests include communication theory and history, media studies and international communication. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, translated into many languages, including: Advertising International: The Privatization of Public Space (1991); Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996), Networking the World 1794–2000 (2000), The Information Society: An Introduction (2003), and, with Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions (1992); The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction (1990) and Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (1998). His most recent book, published in French, is: La Globalisation de la Surveillance: Aux Origines de l’Ordre Sécuritaire (September 2007).

Recent Books on Latin American and Latino/a Popular Culture

It is difficult to keep up with the plethora of published monographs and edited books on Latin American and Latino/a popular culture. American university, as well as independent scholarly and commercial presses, have discovered in the past decade that such books have broad appeal. This was not always the case; twenty years ago it was difficult to find a press that would give a publication proposal on popular culture serious consideration. The unspoken response to such proposals seemed to be that the topic itself did not merit serious scholarly consideration. This trend persisted despite the wide U.S. and Latin American distribution of ground-breaking works published mainly in Latin America and Europe. Happily, this situation no longer exists; one finds entire categories in university and other press catalogues devoted to popular culture and cultural studies. In fact, the arrival of cultural and popular culture studies imported from abroad (e.g., Stuart Hall, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Armand Mattelart, and Ariel Dorfman) has given a strong boost to the acceptability of popular culture studies in the United States.

Technology, Reason and Globalisation?—O Brother!

The Coen Brothers' movie O Brother Where Art Thou is a ragbag of intertexts and gags that also pays very serious attention to questions of community and culture, class and race. In tracing the path of the protagonists through De-pression-era Mississippi, it takes its audiences through the experience of social transformation, from superstition and local concerns to a supposedly brave new (global and technological) world. Although the film is set in a distant time and place, it is informed by a very contemporary issue—the politics of technology, and its relation to the forces of globalisation. It is also a film that exemplifies what Certeau describes as the "cleavage which organizes modernity", a cleavage designated by the terms "science" (which is predicated on a law of rationality, and an imperative to explain, control and order) and "culture". We analyse the work of the film by drawing on the writings of Manuel Castells, Arjun Appadurai and Armand Mattelart to trace its explication of the questions of progress and communication in a world increasingly dominated by neo-liberal values.

Comunicação e interesse público (Entrevista com Armand Mattelart)

In an exclusive interview to Comunicacao & Educacao , professor Armand Mattelart, from the University of Paris 8, talks about his experience, in the 1980's, at the head of the mission of studying and indicating proposals for a project aimed at democratizing access to information and communication technologies. He talks about his concern on teaching Communications and about his books that aim at putting into context, historically and socially, the different lines and tendencies of the communicational thought. Armand Mattelart discusses the communication/education relation, stressing the importance of creating, in the schools, a place for Communication researchers to perform, researchers who be able to teach in the Educational space. He also emphasizes the importance of questioning the commercial and private logic that progressively sweep the public space.