Carol Magee
Assistant Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Abstract
In 1996, two short years after the end of apartheid in South Africa , Sports Illustrated 's (SI) swimsuit issue presented a “South African Adventure”. At first glance, the cover photograph suggests a harmonious world of black and white; posed back to back in leopard print suits are African American, Tyra Banks, and blond-haired Argentinean, Valeria Mazza. A closer reading of the image however, exposes a world of race and fantasy that harkens back to colonial times. In fact, each of the five photographs of black models (Banks and Jamaican Georgiana Robertson) included in the swimsuit issue underscores this interpretation. In this paper, I examine how these five images are ideologically framed by the African context of the photographic shoot and the conventions of ethnographic photography that present black/African female bodies as available, sexual, and wild. This propagation of stereotypical ideas about race and sexuality associated with African bodies is further evident in the ways these photographs are in dialogue with and partake in the conventions of advertising and fashion imagery. I will discuss how these various photographic traditions intersect on the pages of the swimsuit issue to reveal the ways that notions of Africa and Africans are mapped onto the bodies of non-African black models and ultimately how this conflation of Africa and African Diaspora perpetuates disparaging ideas about racialized identities.