“Wildest dreams”: the racial aura of celebrity safari

ABSTRACT

This paper deploys theories of aura to explore the celebrity safari as a mode by which famous people authenticate Africa as a distant, timeless place for a global audience. Their safari depictions create an imagined mystical locale, an aura, that imbues cult value and maintains transnational racial divides. The celebritized racial aura constructs a nostalgic paradise that sits in contrast to the many narratives of misery and privation that celebrity representation also creates. Thus aura commodifies the continent as a kind of playground for the desires of Western publics.

KEYWORDS:

• aura
• celebrity
• postrace
• Africa
• racial aura

Notes

1. Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994).

2. See, for example, Elaine Jeffries and Paul Allatson, eds., Celebrity Philanthropy (Bristol: Intellect, 2015); Lisa Ann Ritchey and Stefano Ponte, Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Liza Tsaliki, Christos A. Frangonikolopoulis, and Asteris Huliaras, eds., Transnational Celebrity Activism in Global Politics (Bristol: Intellect, 2011); Katherine M. Bell, “‘A Delicious Way to Help Save Lives’: Race, Commodification, and Celebrity in Product (RED).” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 4, no. 3 (2011): 163–80; Katherine M. Bell, “Raising Africa?: Celebrity and the Rhetoric of the White Saviour,” PORTAL: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 10, no. 1 (2013). This is a small sample of the many works on this topic.

3. Lilie Chouliaraki, “The Theatricality of Humanitarianism: A Critique of Celebrity Advocacy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2012): 1–21.

4. Chouliaraki discusses persona as a “form of public self that articulates ‘universal’ discourses … with aesthetic choices of unique individuality.” Chouliaraki, “The Theatricality of Humanitarianism,” 5.

5. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 4, trans. and ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA & London: Belknap, 2006).

6. Ibid.

7. Stephen Moss, “Madonna’s Not Our Saviour,” The Guardian, June 8, 2007. Adichie made the comment in an interview upon receiving Britain’s Orange Prize for fiction, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jun/08/orangeprizeforfiction2007.orangeprizeforfiction.

8. Cassandra Herrman, “An African’s Message for America,” The New York Times, January 5, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/opinion/an-africans-message-for-america.html?_r=0.

9. Ibid.

10. See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–37; Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 223–79.

11. “What Do People from USA Think of Africa?” 1 min, 34 sec. (YouTube Video, April 27, 2012), BBC Africa, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi2PV5623HU&list=PLamDvVeiz8l4Tirz2BR2TJFZNzozwrYEy.

12. “What Three Words Come to Mind When You Think of Africa? 2 min. (YouTube video, September 20, 2010), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.

13. Many authors make this case persuasively, including Ritchey and Ponte, Brand Aid; and Chouliaraki, “The Theatricality of Humanitarianism.”

14. Angelina Jolie, interview by Anderson Cooper, Angelina Jolie: Her Mission and Motherhood, CNN, June 20, 2006.

15. I Am Because We Are, directed by Nathan Rissman (London: Semtex Films, 2008).

16. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World,” Cimmarron 2, no. 3 (1990): 3–12. Trouillot writes about outsiders’ focus on exceptionalism of Haiti in a way that exoticizes it.

17. For example, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).

18. V.Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 55–62.

19. Abena P.A. Busia, “What is Africa to Me? Knowledge Possession, Knowledge Production, and the Health of Our Bodies Politic in Africa and the Africa Diaspora,” African Studies Review 49, no. 1 (2006): 15–30. Kwame Anthony Appiah also remarks on erasure with an anecdote about a New York art curator who assumed that a Baule artist on the selection committee for a photography show was only capable of evaluating the art of his own people, and not the overall collection. Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336–37.

20. For example, see Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014).

21. Bell, “A Delicious Way;” Bell, “Raising Africa;” Ritchey and Ponte, Brand Aid.

22. Marshall, Celebrity and Power, 51; Francesco Alberoni, “The Powerless Elite: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars,” in The Celebrity Culture Reader, ed. P. David Marshall (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 108–23.

23. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 260–61.

24. Ibid.

25. Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Racial Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in a Biotechnical Age,” Literature and Medicine 26, no. 1 (2007): 216.

26. Ibid.

27. Ralina L. Joseph, Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mullatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 27.

28. Catherine R. Squires, The Post-Racial Mystique: Media and Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 5–6.

29. Ralina L. Joseph, “Tyra Banks is Fat: Reading (Post-)Racism and (Post-)Feminism in the New Millennium,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26, no. 3 (2009): 237–54.

30. Ibid. Joseph analyzes Banks’s power to authenticate and discipline the racial identities of contestants on her show, America’s Next Top Model. Joseph, “Tyra Banks,” 242.

31. This wording appears in an earlier version of the essay than the third version primarily cited here. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, 2nd ed., eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell), 43.

32. Wildest Dreams, directed by Joseph Kahn. Nashville, TN: Big Machine Records.

33. In 2017, Oprah had 29.6 million followers on Twitter, 11 million on Facebook, and 4.3 million on Instagram. Rihanna had 52.4 million on Twitter, 81 million on Facebook, and 29 million on Instagram.

34. Jonathan Zimmerman, “Americans Think Africa is One Big Wild Animal Reserve,” New Republic, July 8, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/118600/america-must-stop-stereotyping-africa-continent-animals.

35. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 56.

36. Manoucheka Celeste, “Entertaining Mobility: The Racialized and Gendered Nation in ‘House Hunters International,’” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 3 (2016), 535.

37. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 64.

38. Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” in Representing Black Men, eds. Marcellus Blount and George P. Cunningham (New York & London: Routledge, 1996), 181.

39. Hall, “Spectacle of the Other,” 245.

40. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 255.

41. Ralina Joseph, “Imagining Obama: Reading Overtly and Inferentially Racist Images of our 44th President, 2007–2008,” Communication Studies 62, no. 4 (2011): 389–405. Also see Hall, “Spectacle of the Other;” and Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.”

42. Joseph discusses the symbolic equation of blackness to nature and primitivism in representations of the president. The Obama-as-ape trope is based on a historical eugenicist political project to link black citizens genetically to monkeys. Joseph, “Imagining Obama,” 394.

43. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 8.

44. Wildest Dreams.

45. Cedric Clark, “Television and Social Control: Some Observations on the Portrayals of Ethnic Minorities,” Television Quarterly 8 (1969): 18–22.

46. Wills Robinson, “Taylor Swift’s New Wildest Dreams Video is Criticized for Being ‘Racist’ and Based on a ‘Glamorous White Colonial Fantasy’ of Africa,” The Daily Mail, September 2, 2015, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3220003/Taylor-Swift-s-Wildest-Dreams-video-slammed-racist-based-glamorous-white-colonial-fantasy.html.

47. Spencer Kornhaber, “Taylor Swift, ‘Wildest Dreams,’ and the Perils of Nostalgia,” The Atlantic, September 2, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/taylor-swift-wildest-dreams-africa-nostalgia-dangers-colonization-video/403435/.

48. Lauretta Charlton, “Take a Breath—the ‘Wildest Dreams’ Video Isn’t Racist—Now Exhale,” Vulture, September 4, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2015/09/take-a-breather-wildest-dreams-isnt-racist.html.

49. Jessica Goodman, “‘Wildest Dreams’ Director Responds to Allegations of Colonialism in Taylor Swift Video,” Entertainment Weekly, September 2, 2015, http://ew.com/article/2015/09/02/taylor-swift-colonialism-wildest-dreams-video/.

50. Out of Africa, Directed by Sydney Pollack (Hollywood, CA: Universal Pictures).

51. The English Patient, Directed by Anthony Minghella (London: Tiger Moth Productions, 1996).

52. Goodman, “Director Responds.”

53. Erin Whitney, “Taylor Swift’s ‘Wildest Dreams’ Director tries to Defend the Video after Claims of Racism, but Fails,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2015, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/heres-how-taylor-swifts-wildest-dreams-director-is-defending-claims-of-racism_us_55e75bebe4b0aec9f355cbb5.

54. Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 231.

55. Ibid., 33.

56. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 59.

57. Ellen DeGeneres, “Ellen’s Wild Summer.” The Ellen Show, September 5, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjuX0JhkiPQ.

58. Celeste, “Entertaining Mobility.”

59. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. Johnson quotes Patricia Williams: “There is a long tradition of voyeurism as a means of putting culture not just on display but at a condescending distance.”

60. Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves.

61. For more on authenticity and blackness, see Manoucheka Celeste, “Black Women and U.S. Pop Culture in the Post-Identity Era: The Case of Beyoncé Knowles, in Transatlantic Feminisms: Women and Gender Studies in Africa and the Diaspora, ed. Cheryl Rodriguez, Dzodzi Tsikata, and Akosua Adomako Ampofo (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 140.

62. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness.

63. Christine Harold considers the construction of aura through circulation, rather than scarcity, in her analysis of the aesthetic design of consumer goods. Christine Harold, “On Target: Aura, Affect and the Rhetoric of ‘Design Democracy,’” Public Culture 21, no. 3 (2009): 599–618.

64. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 11.

65. For theorizing of Benjamin’s contemporary relevance, see Ulrich Gumbrech and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).

66. See Perecles Lewis, “Walter Benjamin in the Information Age?,” in Mapping Benjamin, 221–29.

67. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1989), 283–84.

68. Benjamin, Selected Writings.

69. Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Room-For-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 13, no. 1 (2004): 2–27.

70. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa, 59.