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173 7. Refrain Africa in the American Imagination Throughout this book I have explored the ways that Disney, Mattel, and Sports Illustrated (SI) (three major American popular culture icons) incorporate African visual culture into their own culture products (Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge [DAKL] and the “it’s a small world” ride, the “Dolls of the World” Barbie collection, and the 1996 SI swimsuit issue), repackaging and re-presenting this visual culture to American consumers. I have, in general, been arguing that the meanings generated by the appearance of African visual culture in American popular culture speak to the complexities of social relations—in particular, drawing attention to the juncture of racialized identities: Euro-American, African American, and African. More specifically, American popular culture, African visual culture, and racialized identities interact in varied and convoluted ways, as issues of nationalism, imperialism, nostalgia, and multiculturalism are negotiated within networks of travel, the circulation of mass media images, globalized corporations, and social institutions such as museums. In fact, I began the analysis of these interactions arguing not only for the significance of Africa to America but also by emphasizing that African visual culture in American popular culture produces understandings and imaginings about both Africa and America. These two threads of meaning are interwoven, moving over and under one another. Accordingly, to draw this study to a close, I ruminate upon these interweavings with an eye toward the places they entwine smoothly as well as where they tangle. In doing so, I reflect upon the insights offered by the preceding analyses and their implications for the world today. Each of the American popular culture forms comprising this study incorporates African visual culture, though each does so via distinct means Refrain: Africa in the American Imagination 174 and to differing ends. Mattel transforms the visual culture, while Disney and SI present the visual culture in its original African form, though positioned in new (American) contexts. Mattel, in transforming kente for its African American and Ghanaian Barbie dolls, looked primarily to the form and visuals of kente, rather than to its indigenous meanings. SI, like Mattel, focused on form (though without transforming it) rather than on meaning in presenting Ndebele visual culture on the pages of the swimsuit issue. But SI’s engagement with the visual culture, as a focus in and of itself, was less explicit than Mattel’s or Disney’s. Disney engaged African visual culture explicitly and directly by purchasing it for display in DAKL, and in doing so employed the meanings of the visual culture as they are understood in their African contexts. At the same time, the presence of African visual culture in these popular culture forms creates new meanings for and understandings of it in these American contexts. These new meanings and understandings convey values and messages to their consuming publics, socializing them into the explicit and implicit ideas and ideologies that the cultural products (re)present. Both the “Dolls of the World” collection and the “it’s a small world” ride offer microcosmic representations of the world, depicting children from myriad cultures. Within these worlds, cultures are defined primarily through the use of costume . These costumes establish difference (here read as “Africa”) and help to define America in opposition to the differences. In my discussion of Barbie, I argued that the authenticity of the cultural data—in the form of clothes, accessories, and information provided on the back of the box— provides knowledge that situates the owner/collector in a position of control over the world represented by these Barbie dolls, a world that speaks to a time when people’s places in the world in relation to one another were seemingly more well defined. They imagine a world untroubled by the upheavals of the civil rights and feminist movements, a world prior to contemporary American society. Both Mattel’s world of Barbie and Disney’s “it’s a small world” ride evidence nostalgia for the America that (seemingly ) existed prior to the rise of multiculturalism and increased global migration, and they do so through representations that, at first glance, seem to embrace the pluralist vision that is the overt message of these products. The presence of Africa within these worlds helps establish the progressive pluralism, though Africa’s treatment speaks to their regressive messages. In this, one can see how popular culture products can be both productive and problematic at the same time, a point illustrated...

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