Why Swift Got Cyber Boo-ed For Her Messed Up Exoticising Of Colonial Africa

Who would have imagined all hell would break loose on the internet when Taylor Swift’s latest video hit Youtube recently? When you look at it, ‘Wildest Dreams’ isn’t very different from the majority of the singer’s filmography. Swift may have reinvented the look and feel of her videos from the sugar-sweet blonde we knew in 2008, but, with the exception of ‘Bad Blood’ and ‘Shake It Off’, her videos are mostly variations of a straight-vanilla-romance-montage. So why would anybody be bothered by this one in particular?

Much of the video is set in 1950s colonial Africa, and if your alarm bells have already gone off, you’ll see why the internet has quickly split into two insistent camps of “that’s racist!” and “no it isn’t!”

If Iggy Azealea’s music video for ‘Bounce’ (which was apparently escapist, fun and ridiculous) was bizarre for me as a South Asian person to watch, I can’t even begin to imagine what the descendants of Africa’s colonized populations thought of ‘Wildest Dreams’.

NPR writers Viviane Rutabingwa and James Kassaga Arinaitwe criticized Swift for packaging “our continent as the backdrop for her romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic.”

Are there any obvious markers of colonial violence in the video? It’s not the setting of ‘Django Unchained’, that’s for sure, but the implied racism of white actors in 1950s Africa is apparent to anybody who’s dabbled in history. It’s an implication Swift ought to have been sensitive to, but wasn’t, and let’s not pretend we’re surprised at all. Her responses to Trinidadian-born rapper-singer Nicki Minaj on twitter exposed her inability to understand the intersectionality of race.

At the same time, [envoke_twitter_link]the oversight doesn’t necessarily make her racist scum[/envoke_twitter_link], as Lauretta Charlton points out in her Vulture article. One thing remains clear, however — the burden of history is not the white man’s. Or the white woman’s.

It’s not likely that Swift intended to salt the still open wound of colonialism, but, as Ruth Frankenberg explains in “Growing up White: Feminism, Racism and the Social Geography of Childhood,” she has the privilege of distancing herself from colonialism and identifying as a neutral party.

‘Wildest Dreams’ suggestions about ‘the dark continent’ as a feast for colonial eyes — with its untamed expanses and wildlife, its exotic unreality — are subtle, but they’re there. And it’s something that could have been avoided entirely. [envoke_twitter_link]Swift could have easily kept the theme of her 1950s Hollywood romance with a setting on American soil[/envoke_twitter_link] — beach party films were a very popular subgenre. Or even just filmed in the Rockies, where there’s plenty of American wildlife!

So when the internet exploded, Swift wasn’t the only person whose integrity was called into question. The man behind the video is Joseph Kahn, the Korean-American director with an illustrious and diverse career in music videos. Kahn reacted to the accusations of racism by pointing to his “25 years of most diverse multicultural work”. As if picking up on Charlton’s argument, he reminded the seething internet not to expend its energies criticizing ‘Wildest Dreams’ because: “when people make false accusations of racism and the public rejects it, it makes real racism harder to fight.”

Would the video be any better if it had more African characters? Was it at all necessary for Swift to romanticize colonial Africa? Artistic license is one thing, but artists, especially those with as much mass appeal and reach as Swift has, need to be cognizant of their responsibilities with every element of pop culture they add to our consciousness.