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4 Photography, Narrative Interventions, and (Cross) Cultural Representations cARol mAgee Every year in the wintry cold of late January or early February, Time, Inc., releases the much-anticipated sports illustrated swimsuit issue. The swimsuit-clad models are meant to transport readers out of the doldrums of winter to the warmth of tropical locations (e.g., Bermuda, Bora Bora, Dominican Republic, Mexico). Shot in a different location every year—sports illustrated identifies the locale each time, but in many ways one beach could be any other—each issue offers a fantasy world of sun-drenched fun. Occasionally, however, a site is chosen that manifests its location specifically through well-known land formations or the indigenous architecture . Such is the case with the 1996 swimsuit issue. Shot in South Africa, its presentation of Ndebele visual culture is fundamental to establishing the locale for readers. Beaded jewelry is most common, though there are two images in the photo essay in which Ndebele wall painting predominates.1 As an American art historian versed in postcolonial and feminist theory, I read these images in a particular way, focusing on issues of race, exploitation, and neocolonialism . At the same time, as an Africanist trained to listen to indigenous voices, my readings seem incomplete without the perspective of Ndebele informants . One of the most prominent paradigms of our field demands it, although this paradigm can be troublesome: it has the potential of privileging local production and intention to the neglect of global consumption and interpretation, despite the fact that with African visual culture—whether in a book, classroom, gallery, or museum—a great deal of consumption is nonlocal. It is therefore vital to consider the ways in which consumption of African visual culture is translocal, moving between localities, each of which brings additional meanings that are interwoven with others, resulting in objects and images rich with deeply textured meanings.2 While the swimsuit issue’s images are intended for an audience beyond South Africa , the viewing of the images by the Ndebele participants needs also to be consid- photoGrAphy 57 ered. As this discussion will reveal, the Ndebele viewers with whom I spoke bring alternative interpretations to the photographs. The circulation of images and ideas in which the swimsuit issue participates raises significant questions about how the global and local intersect, how these intersections are narrated, and what role interviews and ethnography might play in the meanings they engender. The intersections of the global and local have always been part and parcel of cross-cultural encounters, yet it has only been since the 1990s or so that they have become the focused center of inquiry and investigation, and that the stakes of the power relations involved in the various methods of knowledge production around such intersections have been rigorously interrogated. Along these lines, Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, considering writing as a political process, argue that the task for scholars is “forging links between different knowledges that are possible from different locations and tracing lines of possible alliance and common purpose between them.”3 Interviews, I submit, can be important components in this process of connecting various locations—that of the interviewer with that of the interviewee, and those of the scholar and her audiences. When employed in a critical and reflective manner, interviews can assist in creating narratives around visual culture that reflect the complexity of these intersections and exchanges. In what follows I address this process of linking different knowledges and locations through some interactions that occurred around two photographs in the magazine and a third published in the swimsuit desk calendar that was marketed the same year. In the first photograph, model Kathy Ireland stands in the doorway of a building covered with the bright geometric patterns of Ndebele wall paintings. Ireland’s swimsuit, designed by American Norma Kamali, and her beaded bracelets echo the geometric patterns and colors of the painted walls around her. Two Ndebele women are seated on either side of Ireland. Viewed through the lens of my training in art history, I read this image as participating in neocolonialist discourses: privileging white over black and positioning Africa as inferior to America. It has a classic hierarchical composition, implying that the (white) figure in the middle, as the largest and highest in the pictorial space, is the most important. Ireland towers over the other women. Standing on her tiptoes, she dominates their space, too big to fit comfortably in their doorway. In contrast to the identity of the model, which is...

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