Notes
181 Notes 1. Introduction 1. Somalian supermodel Iman is the exception, though the musician Seal is closely associated with his Nigerian heritage. 2. As recently as September 2010, this could be seen at http://gawker.com/news/ photoshop/gwyneths-african-ad-inspires-imitators-193729.php. 3. These advertisements appeared in magazines as varied as Glamour and Condé Nast Traveler in the winter of 2006 and could be seen in 2008 at http:// keepachildalive.org/media/index.php?p=IamAfrican, though in September 2010 they were no longer available. 4. The majority of men who appear in the ad are clothed; Tyson Beckford and Seal are the exceptions. Both of these men are black, which adds the additional association of skin to the mix. Lenny Kravitz is the only other black male included in this campaign, but he wears clothes. Although their appearances may reflect selfmarketing choices, I posit this is not the case, as the women in the ads appear different than they do in other popular images. Rather, it suggests that the campaign designers have made this choice in appearances. 5. While the Keep A Child Alive Foundation was willing to let me reproduce the image of Lucy Liu here, the photographer, Michael Thompson, was not. 6. Su Holmes and Sean Redmond, eds., Framing Celebrity: New Directions in Celebrity Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Jessica Evans and David Hesmondhalgh, eds., Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2005). 7. These studies come out of the disciplines of anthropology, history, literary studies, and sociology. Curtis Keim’s study is closest to mine in terms of his focus on popular media and American imaginings, though he presents a survey of these ideas without in-depth analysis of his many examples. Originally published in 1999, a second edition of this text was published in 2009, and I use that edition when citing specific passages. Curtis A. Keim, Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and Inventions of the American Mind, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2009). Cornelia Sears examines the construction of these images of Africa in America from 1870 to 1955. Cornelia Sears, “Africa in the American Mind, 1870–1955: A Study in Mythology, Ideology and the Reconstruction of Race” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley 1997). V. Y. Mudimbe investigates philosophical and literary representations of Africa. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order Notes 182 of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, and London: James Currey, 1994). He also touches on African visual culture, though his treatment of it isolates it in a museum context rather than looking at its broader circulation, and his treatment of European imagery is not nearly as extensive as that offered by Jan Nederveen Pieterse, who explores the visual side of representations of blacks in the West. Nederveen Pieterse focuses more on representations of people within art and popular culture. Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). Most recently, James Ferguson has examined the implications for considering “Africa” as a concept in relation to and against the traditions of the specificity of anthropological studies that look at particular African locales and peoples. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 8. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 1–23. 9. The Exploris Museum merged with Playspace in 2007 and is now the Marbles Kids Museum. 10. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 11. In one account, for example, traditional art “emphasizes its connection to received forms more than the invention of the individual artist. . . . Traditional art is village based, and is made by artists who work mainly for members of their own ethnic groups.” Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: Center for African Art, and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1991), 10. Too, in asserting a particular characterization of traditional, I am drawing from Eric Hobsbawm’s definition. He offers: “‘Invented tradition’ is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1. He uses “invented...
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