Scholars of Africa are often shocked and saddened by representations of Africa in American popular culture. Our experiences of Africa do not usually correspond to the various Africas presented in movies, magazines, schools, churches, news media, television programs, and many other places. American popular treatment of Africa is typically erroneous and unbalanced, with an overemphasis on trouble, nature, and the so-called traditional (read “primitive”) customs of rural Africans.

Author Carol Magee, who teaches at the University of North Carolina, analyzes three examples of American popular visual representations of Africa: a Sports Illustrated cover and article, a Barbie doll, and Walt Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge. The examples are especially useful, because they are so recognizably American and so ordinary. Magee, a specialist in African art and the interpretation of visual culture, has written this book for the nonspecialist. Her analysis is both sophisticated and accessible.

The Sports Illustrated cover and article feature two American fashion models, one black and one white, photographed in front of a colorful Ndebele house in South Africa. Magee actually went to South Africa and was able to find the house and talk to one of the African women in the photograph. She discovered that the house was part of a tourist folk museum rather than a contemporary residence, and that the two African women were cultural guides, dressed in clothing that has not been common for decades. The article did not reveal this. The American equivalent might be a swimsuit photo in a farm museum with reenactors. While American viewers would not mistake the museum for American life today, few have such contextual knowledge for African images like those in Sports Illustrated.

Magee draws additional lessons about constructing difference from the Sports Illustrated material. For example, she carefully explores the depictions of the white and black models and finds that the black model is primitivized by comparison. And Magee discusses tourism as “symbolic colonialism” (71). When tourists arrive in Africa they already know from popular culture what they are supposed to see and what it is supposed to mean. “In seeking out experiences of the exotic,” writes Magee, “the tourist reestablishes solid notions of self and reasserts her or his own position in the world” (90).

American Barbie has been deconstructed many times by other scholars. Here Magee shows how Ghanaian Barbie, a doll who has no African name and whose Kente cloth clothing cannot be changed, “offers a way of remembering a romanticized and idealized past (clearly defined and meaningful national boundaries, homogenous nationalism, and U.S. superiority in the world)” and “a way of forgetting that which disrupts it (identity politics, postcoloniality, and globalization)” (99).

For Magee, Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge in Florida serves to re-create an African safari experience within a grand lodge surrounded by African animals. However, the lodge experience, like all Disney experiences, is merely an illusion. Here there is order (animals on demand, art in display cases); safety (no disease, no accessible claws); nature, not culture (Africa close to nature, not civilization); nostalgia (art from the precolonial and colonial eras without a modern context); and primitiveness (art identified by group, not artist, evoking stereotypical tribes and blackness). Magee concludes, “The success of DAKL's fantasy experience relies on the imagined distance between Africa and America being maintained” (171). This is the difference imagined by colonialism, for in Disney's illusion there is no conflict or change and Africa is subservient. Disney's America is equally an illusion.

Magee emphasizes that in each of her three cases the photographers, authors, and designers did not necessarily set out to portray Africa negatively. Indeed, Barbie and Disney's lodge might be seen by some as celebrations of Africa. Thus we need to look at the wider cultural framework in which these representations of Africa have meaning in order to understand their negative origins and impact. We see what we have been taught to see. The three cases, presented here so well, reflect and perpetuate Euro-American views of Africans (and also African Americans, women, and nature) as primitive. They do not adequately educate us to our similarities and shared lives with Africans and Africa.