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Channeling out of Africa': Colonial Chic and Imperial Nostalgia in Postcolonial Worlds

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Channeling out of Africa': Colonial Chic and Imperial Nostalgia in Postcolonial Worlds Channeling Out of Africa’: colonial chic and imperial nostalgia in postcolonial worlds Annemi Conradie WISER seminar paper, 13 May 2019. The UK Daily Mail of 11 January 2013 published an article titled, ‘Out of Africa: the sun will never set on the laid-back classic colonial look’ (Fig 1). The same year saw an Out of Africa fashion shoot for Harper’s Bazaar Brazil. The January 2018 issue of its Greek edition had an Out of Africa accessory feature to assist readers in perfecting the ‘safari look’. The same year it commissioned Alexei Lubomirski to do an Out of Africa shoot for its June/July United States edition. The advertising campaign for the 2017 Las Vegas Winter décor market reproduced Blixen-glamour in the desert, with pensive model in white and khaki posing with travelling trunks, a safari helmet and white Borzoi hound. In Kenya, where Blixen lived for seventeen years, guests of the Angama Mara lodge can have a 1920s picnic on the very spot where Meryl Streep (playing Blixen) and Robert Redford (as Blixen’s lover, Denys Finch Hatton) were filmed picnicking. This movie moment was also recreated in a 2010 Louis Vuitton’s promotional film starring Dree Hemingway, great-grand daughter of Ernest, who travelled and hunted in Africa. Wedding directory service, Wedding Friends, offers weddings and photo shoots with an ‘Out of Africa-feel’. Inspired by the film and its contemporary trend-setter, Ralph Lauren’s Safari collections, this ‘feel’ is created with décor elements such as “an old pair of binoculars, antique books and a pith helmet … to reinforce the colonial feel, as [do] old-fashioned luxury luggage” (The ‘in love with Africa’ styled shoot. 2018). Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film of Karen Blixen’s memoir, Out of Africa (1937), launched an enduring fashion trend and international industry. Whether in the former settler colonies or the metropole, Out of Africa bolstered the ‘colonial’ as a style trend that suggests glamour, luxury and adventure. This trend, and its commercial manifestations colonial chic and safari chic, are steeped in nostalgic feelings about a mythical, imperial age. Colonial nostalgia can be described as a paradigm and industry and it has only grown in popularity and magnitude since the 1980s. Imperial nostalgia frequently featured in American and British films, but from the late twentieth century, it steadily infiltrated mass culture, media and “the stuff of everyday life, linking desire to design, décor, and dress” (William Bissell 2005:216). Colonial and safari chic invite consumers to indulge in, recreate or relive (if only vicariously) Blixen and company’s romantic adventures, pictured against the backdrop of colonial Africa. Stepping beyond the edges of this backdrop and focussing on the histories that this glamorous surface obscures, I interrogate the trends with the questions: ‘whose colonial’ and ‘whose safaris? The questions are developed 1 through my focus on two objects that have become quintessential staples of colonial and safari style: the vintage travel trunk and the safari helmet. Looking at the stylistic and narrative deployment of these accessories I examine, on the one hand, the colonial trope of (self-)discovery and adventure, and on the other, the iconography of excess and servitude. Out of Africa The 1980s saw a slew of British and American cinematic adaptations of colonial-era fiction or memoirs set in the British colonies1. For Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o, (2013:72) twentieth century Western films set in Africa are “no more than a repackaging of images of colonial narratives”, and he regards Out of Africa as a prime example. Published in 1937 under the pen-name Isak Denisen, Out of Africa is the title of Danish aristocrat Karen Blixen-Finecke’s memoir of the seventeen years during which she lived and ran a coffee plantation in the former British East Africa, today’s Kenya. For Annie Gagiano (1995:107), Blixen’s Africa is a “romantic falsification”, and despite its clarity of style, there is a “prettifying haziness” that veil harsher details. The same can be said of Pollack’s historic melodrama. The cinematic adaptation of Blixen’s memoirs was immensely popular and won seven Academy Awards2. While the film recounts some of her day-to-day joys and tribulations, the focus is Blixen’s sweetly tragic romances, the first with Africa, and the second with the gentrified hunter. Shot on location, Africa provides an enchanting, challenging setting for the Baroness’s quest to assert her independence and liberalism through working the land, hunting game, uplifting the natives and pursuing an illicit love affair. Africa becomes the site for escape from the constraints of Western civilisation and the enjoyment of upper-class luxuries, where the feudal class system and aristocratic privilege are preserved and European gender norms are thwarted. Like numerous written accounts of colonial adventurers, native Africans are minor characters in the white protagonists’ dramas. In Pollack’s film the natives are pictured as singing workers, as loyal servants in uniform or as noble savages, or in tribal dress and in the wild. Blixen’s house – the envy of many décor bloggers - is furnished with porcelain, crystal, paintings and rugs brought from Denmark, and presents a feminine, refined counterpart to her tough, more androgynous outdoor persona. The design feature ‘Channeling Out of Africa’ does not merely show consumers how to recreate the look of Blixen’s house (Fig 2). It invites them to harness the ‘spirit’ or essence of the film and the consumerist myth of Blixen’s African adventure. Suggestive of a designer’s mood board, the feature includes film stills of contemplative leisure and romantic encounters in the 1 These include, among others, Passage to India (1984), King Solomon’s Mines (1937, 1950, 1984, 2004), Alan Quartermain and the lost city of gold (1986), the television serial The Flame trees of Thika (1981), Greystoke: the legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). 2 The film script was based on “Out of Africa and other writings by Isak Denisen” (Pollack 1985) 2 African landscape, rather than images of Blixen’s home interior décor. For Wilson (2001:2) colonial revivals exist in “forms both physical and mental, objects and ideas”. Designer and consumer ‘channeling’ of colonial chic finds expression through consumption of selected products and images that products that address consumer desires for the nostalgic, adventurous and exotic. Colonial and safari chic The term nostalgia is derived from the Greek nostos (to return home) and algia (a painful condition), and most definitions of the term explain it as the pleasant feeling about a previous time or an object from the past (Rutherford and Shaw 2011:59). Like retro, which similarly experienced a boom in the 1980s, nostalgia is unconcerned with historical accuracy, the sanctity of tradition or reinforcing social values (Guffey 2006: 10-11). Unlike retro – which regards the past with irony, humour or sarcasm – colonial chic is sentimental, wistful and indulgent. The term ‘nostalgia industry’ (Samuel 2012:91) is an apt moniker for the sentimentalist colonial chic and safari chic. While colonial chic and colonial nostalgia and are linked through their relationship to imperialism, I differentiate between the two Colonial nostalgia may describe nostalgic feelings or longing for the days of colonialism as expressed by formerly colonised people in postcolonial contexts (see Dlamini 2009, Huyssen 2000) 3. Such sentiments are complex and heterogeneous as it links in ambiguous ways with memory and vicarious nostalgia about the pre-democratic past4. These feelings of longing circulate in social, political and commercial terrains where they tie in with the significant work of memory, which is central to constructions of postcolonial subject positions and are used in subversive, critical purposes ways (Bissell 2005: 217). Unlike such a reflexive nostalgia, colonial chic (or colonial style as it is sometimes called) is discussed here as stylistic impulse and trend. Colonial chic and its attendant trend, safari chic, derive from the mythologised images of the luxurious settler homes, the glamorous tented camps and adventures of wealthy colonial explorers, writers and hunters. I regard the trends as the aesthetic and commercial expressions of what Bissell (2005:217) calls “regressive” imperial nostalgia, marked by persistent orientalist and primitivist impulses. In colonial chic, as I shall argue, the trend’s relationship to imperialism is repressed through the mythologizing and reification of history5. 3 I am by no means suggesting that postcolonial subjects who feel nostalgic about aspects of colonialism are not consumers or producers of colonial and safari chic. 4 Rosaldo (1989:115) highlights that ‘cultural insiders’ may mourn change brought about by themselves, whether by necessity or choice, through the embrace of ‘progress’, religious conversion, schooling, or the commodification of their cultural heritage (Rosaldo 1989: 115). 5 My critique of colonial chic is by no means a denunciation of nostalgia, or of people’s use, display and attachment to goods or images that evoke the past, memories or feelings of nostalgia. Individuals use nostalgic signifiers for different and important ends, such as remembrance, commemoration or to challenge hegemonic narratives (Rosaldo 1989:116). 3 I focus on commercial aesthetic manifestations of colonial and safari chic that suggest Africa and evoke, replicate or cite Pollock’s Out of Africa. The examples I discuss all date from the last two decades and were found in décor, fashion, travel and in-flight magazines, websites and blogs, promotional videos and coffee table books. Another, contemporary, influence on colonial and safari chic were the advertising campaigns for Ralph Lauren’s Safari home and fashion collections (Fig 3). Launched in the 1980s, Lauren’s much-copied advertisements continue citing Blixen’s African sojourn into the twenty- first century6. Colonial chic indulges in romanticised notions of colonial privilege, and the wealth and status it implies was hardly the reality of most whites living in the colonies.
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