In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 1. Introduction Popular Culture, Racialized Identities, and African Visual Culture Objects are one means, then, by which humans shape their world, and their actions have both intended and unintended consequences. —kris l. hardin and mary jo arnoldi, African Material Culture “I am African” declares the full-page, black-and-white advertisements featuring David Bowie, Gwyneth Paltrow, Gisele Bündchen, Lucy Liu, Liv Tyler, Alicia Keys, or any one of nine other celebrities from the worlds of film, music, and fashion. Despite this declaration, the majority of viewers know that most of these individuals are not African in any commonsense understanding of what being “African” means: they were not born on the continent, have not established citizenship in an African nation, and do not live there now.1 But the designers of this campaign want to stress that, genetically, we are all from Africa; human life evolved in and moved out of Africa to populate the world. We therefore share not only a biological heritage but also a general humanity. If we are all African, we all have a stake in what happens there. Africa means something to us. Given this, the ads urge us to give our money to the Keep A Child Alive organization. The small print says, “Help us stop the dying. Pay for lifesaving AIDS drugs that can help keep a child, a mother, a father, a family alive. Visit keepachild alive.org to help.” This 2006 campaign was created with the best of intentions . It did not have the best of results. In a world where Africa is the focus of much charitable attention, skeptics see such moves as exploiting African crises to bring more visibility to the celebrity. Counterimages soon circulated on the Internet. One in particular addresses the perceived superficiality of celebrity participation.2 It is a black-and-white photograph of a dark-skinned female (identified only as “an African woman”); “I am Gwyneth Paltrow” is written across the bottom Introduction 4 of the image. Underneath this, the small print declares, “Help us stop the shameless famewhores from using the suffering of those dying of AIDS in Africa to help bolster their pathetic careers now that they’re no longer dating Brad Pitt and no one gives a shit about them. Just kiss my black ass to help.” Despite such critiques, the Keep A Child Alive organization kept using the campaign, and the images were still present on their Web site in 2008.3 While the media have reported on the controversy surrounding these images, very little attention has been given to their visual elements, the emotional and social reactions they trigger, and what they say about how Africa is imagined for and by mass media consumers. The imagining of Africa through popular culture is the subject of this study. Myriad American cultural products incorporate African visual culture , peoples, or landscapes. This book focuses on three case studies, each of which repackages African visual culture for American consumers: Mattel ’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated (SI) swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. In particular, it analyzes the ways in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they are articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. Two major threads run throughout this study. In the first, I analyze how these companies’ uses of African visual culture generate ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second thread runs parallel to and, at times, is interwoven into the first; here I investigate the way that African visual culture, such as textiles, jewelry, architecture, and sculpture, focuses American self-understandings, particularly around black and white racialized identities. The time period for this study, the 1990s through the present, reflects an increased visibility of previously marginalized groups (women, homosexuals, blacks, and other people of color) within American society, a visibility that plays into what I suggest is a current crisis of identity for America. This crisis is mediated through popular culture forms, around racialized identities, and in relation to other cultures. In short, this set of case studies reveals not only the multiple ways that Africa functions in an American imagination, the multiple meanings it embodies, it also examines the conditions that gave rise to, and consequences of and implications for, such imaginings. Although not the focus of this study, the “I am African” advertising campaign succinctly reveals many of the issues I engage, and demonstrates their presence and relevance beyond...

Share