Performance as Activism and Utopia in the Americas
“Occupy the imagination, before someone else does” read the slogan of filmmaker Rodrigo Dorfman for his 2013 movie “Occupy the imagination: Tales of seduction and resistance.” The film took as a point of departure the book “How to Read Donald Duck”, that Rodrigo Dorfman’s father, Chilean author Ariel Dorfman wrote and published in 1971, under Allende’s government. The book, that Rodrigo calls “a manual to decolonize our imagination,” explored the racist, colonial, and imperialist subtext in Disney’s cartoons, and it was banned after the 1973 coup in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, as well as in the U.S. The slogan “occupy” as a motto for resisting and challenging capitalism has been since its inception criticized by academics of color, most poignantly by Jessica Yee, for its lack of acknowledgment of colonialism, and of the fact that the land where anti-capitalist struggles are taking place are already “occupied” and in fact need to be decolonized. The question of what does it mean