Africa in the American Imagination: Popular Culture, Radicalized Identities, and African Visual Culture

3. “It’s Sort of Like National Geographic Meets Sports Illustrated” [Contains Image Plates]

59 3. “It’s Sort of Like National Geographic Meets Sports Illustrated” The photograph and the non-Western person share two fundamental attributes in the culturally tutored experience of most Americans ; they are objects at which we look. The photograph has this quality because it is usually intended as a thing of either beauty or documentary interest and surveillance. Non-Westerners draw a look, rather than inattention or interaction, to the extent that their difference or foreignness defines them as noteworthy yet distant. —catherine lutz and jane collins, Reading National Geographic Every year the editors of Sports Illustrated (SI) load models and photographers onto planes and set off for tropical locales with gorgeous beaches and sparkling waters to produce the much anticipated swimsuit issue. The swimsuit issues are therefore framed by travel: the travel of the models to the sites, the “armchair” travel evoked in reading the magazine, and, in this particular instance, my own travel to investigate the 1996 issue. Although these moments of travel are temporally unrelated, they have in common the discourses, spectacles, and commodifications of tourist culture. To elucidate this, I focus on two images in the photo essay that use Ndebele people and visual culture to evoke the South African locale. I touch also upon other images from this same photo shoot that were in the 1997 SI swimsuit desk calendar, but did not make it into the swimsuit issue itself. I argue two things. The first is that touristic travel, in the context of this swimsuit issue, “It’s Sort of Like National Geographic Meets Sports Illustrated” 60 60 reflects racial conceptions that posit Africans as inferior to Westerners. It is accomplished through representational practices that perpetuate colonial relations, but also by implying the traditional/modern dichotomy as a means to mediate contemporary American identities in relation to the rest of the world. At the same time, as was evident with the other photographs of this swimsuit issue and the Keep A Child Alive advertisements, divergent narratives exist. These images suggest the above meanings for a U.S. audience, but for an Ndebele audience, and certainly for the Ndebele participants in this photographic shoot, they convey different meanings. My second argument is, then, that these photographs speak to autonomy, cultural pride, and economic power, especially as they relate to the postapartheid moment in which the photo shoot took place. This chapter explores these contrasting meanings as well as the intersections of various localities in these representations.1 As I delineated in the previous chapter, the discourses of darkest Africa, social Darwinism, and other racial theories that were solidified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries posited Africans as wild, sexual, natural, and uncivilized—all things Westerners were not—and these perceptions emerge in the images in the SI swimsuit issue. Such understandings of Africans reduced them to these few characteristics and discouraged meaningful engagement. Photography, then and now, helps to produce, perpetuate, and/or disseminate these ideas. In this chapter, I expand this discussion to consider the presence of indigenous South Africans and their visual culture on the pages of the 1996 swimsuit issue. Where in the preceding chapter I looked at the traditions of ethnographic, advertising, and fashion photography as they informed the swimsuit issue photographs, in this chapter I add tourism and tourist photography to the analysis. Before doing so, however, I discuss Ndebele visual culture and its appearance on the pages of this swimsuit issue. In the first photo I consider (Figure 3.1), Kathy Ireland stands in the doorway of an Ndebele building, with two Ndebele women in ceremonial attire seated on either side. Ireland’s swimsuit, designed by American Norma Kamali, echoes the geometric patterns and colors of the building ’s painted walls.2 She wears a felt cap, common to women in Ndebele society, as well as two beaded bracelets. In the second photograph (Figure 3.2), Georgianna Robertson also stands in front of an Ndebele building. Rather than placing her in a suit that evokes the patterning of the murals, she wears only a thong, and has geometric designs painted on her bare breasts. What role did Ndebele women have in this body painting? What “It’s Sort of Like National Geographic Meets Sports Illustrated” 61 61 Figure 3.1. Kathy Ireland at Ndebele Village, Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, 1996 Photograph: Robert Huntzinger/Sports Illustrated/Contour by Getty...