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This chapter focuses on the second of the three case studies on how Africa is imagined through popular culture, namely, Mattel’s world of Barbie. This chapter first looks at Mattel’s Princess of South Africa (2003), who was dressed in the same garments as Martha Nomvula in the Sports Illustrated photograph with Kathy Ireland. Research shows that this Barbie’s costuming is an homage to Ndebele culture, keeping with the Ndebele styles and traditions. In the same way that Sports Illustrated did previously, Mattel chose Ndebele culture as a representation of all South African indigenous cultures, as well as South Africa as a whole. The chapter thus examines the presence of Ndebele culture in the Sports Illustrated and Barbie worlds. Where the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue could be read as both reductive and empowering, the sense of empowerment in Mattel’s world of Barbie is largely diminished. The chapter thus asserts that even though Ndebele culture gains exposure to large audiences, this exposure does not adequately balance the problematic issues that this Barbie and its companion dolls manifest.

This chapter turns to the third case study concerning the imagining of Africa through popular culture. This chapter primarily engages the ways in which, like Mattel’s world of Barbie, the world of Disney — particularly the Walt Disney World Resort — creates a symbolic and metaphoric control of the world through its depictions of other worlds and cultures. Many instances can be found in the Walt Disney World Resort that present different perspectives of Africa. The problem with these perspectives, however, is that they all share some basic elements that work to create implicit messages about Africa as natural, inferior, and subservient to America. Like Barbie, the act of costuming is central to the construction of these messages, and is most evident with the “it’s a small world” ride. The chapter thus further examines and explores the implications of this ride for how Africa is perceived within American culture.

This chapter summarizes the implications and insights that have been explored throughout the book with regard to the way that Disney, Mattel, and Sports Illustrated have incorporated African visual culture into their own culture products. These three major American popular culture icons have repackaged and re-presented this visual culture to American consumers in such a way that it produces certain meanings and implications about America itself. This African visual culture in American popular culture produces understandings and imaginings about both Africa and America, in that Disney and Sports Illustrated present the visual culture in its original African form — although positioned in new (American) contexts. Disney, for example, through its “it’s a small world” ride, offers a microscopic representation of the world, depicting children from a myriad of cultures, but at the same time it creates different explicit and implicit ideas and ideologies. Primarily, they help to define America in opposition to the differences in other cultures.

This chapter traces the development of handheld games. The discussions include Mattel’s release of its first popular handheld game—Football—in 1977; the emergence of portable consoles; the popularity of Nintendo’s Game Boy and the Nintendo DS; the Tamagotchi; Floodgate Studios’ Mo-Pets; the advent of cell phone games; location-based games; and alternate reality games.