New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

200 The New Imperialists
of U.S. media corporations and the Cold War foreign policies of the
American state. In 1971, prior to the C.I.A.-sponsored coup in Chile that
installed the dictator General Pinochet, Ariel Dorfman and Armand
Mattelart, two Chilean communication scholars inspired by the socialist
goals of Allende’s Popular Unity government, wrote How to Read Donald
Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. 1 They read Disney comics
as vehicles of U.S. cultural imperialism. Disney comics, Dorfmann and
Mattelart argued, touted the possessive individualism of the American
way of life, implied excessive consumerism was the path to happiness,
and (like so many colonial texts) constructed non-Americans as culturally
savage and primitive.
A more rigorous discussion of U.S. cultural imperialism came from
the political economist Herbert Schiller, who was situated within the
universities of the imperial core. Schiller described the struggle of U.S.
media firms and the American state to shape the global communication
system according to their economic and political interests as U.S. cultural
imperialism: “the sum processes by which a society is brought into the
modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted,
pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions
to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the
dominating centres of the system.” 2 For Schiller, the American empire
incorporated different nation-states as peripheries by establishing a
technological infrastructure conducive to U.S. political and economic
control. On the terrain of ideology and culture, the U.S. media reinforced
this process by transmitting, “in their imagery and messages, the beliefs
and perspectives that create and reinforce their audiences’ attachments to
the way things are in the system overall.” 3
For Dorfman, Mattelart, Schiller, and many other critics, U.S. cultural
imperialism eventually came to mean the global export of the capitalist/
commercial form of the U.S. media system, the economic and ideological
domination of the global communication system by U.S. corporations,
and the homogenization and integration of the world with the social
relations and cultural values of a globally expanding yet American-led
capitalism. U.S. cultural imperialism was said to have many effects.
Globally dispersed populations were transformed into new audience
commodities for American advertising firms and new consumers for U.S.
media corporations. The capacities of newly “liberated” postcolonial
states and populations to autonomously produce media and represent