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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, like the previous one, focuses on particular facilities at the Walt Disney World Resort where there exist certain implications for the perception of Africa in American popular culture. In this chapter, the focus is on Disney’s Animal Kingdom Lodge (DAKL), which focuses solely on Africa and Africans. To be specific, DAKL presents an Africa south of the Sahara, a geographic divide that distinguishes between Arab Africa to the north and black Africa to the south. A closer look at DAKL reveals that the experience is conceived as a safari which re-creates the African savanna in Florida. At the lodge, visitors can eat African food, watch African animals roam, and learn about African cultures. The problem that the chapter addresses, however, is similar to the problems in representation that were evident in the previous cases. Like them, the Africa at DAKL is nature and animals, operating as stereotypes and thus producing negative resonances and problematic implications.

This chapter introduces the intrinsic purpose and aim of the book: the imagining of Africa through popular culture. The book focuses on three case studies, each of which has repackaged African visual culture for the American consumer. These cases involve Mattel’s world of Barbie, the 1996 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, and the Walt Disney World Resort. The study focuses primarily on the way in which visual culture reinforces, challenges, and represents social relations, especially as they have been articulated around racialized identities in the past twenty years. The first task in this study, then, is the analysis of how three companies used African visual culture, and how they have generated ideological understandings of Africa for an American public. The second task involves the investigation of the way that African visual culture focuses Americans’ understanding of themselves, particularly around black and white racialized identities.