The Colonial Gaze: Imperialism, Myths, and South African Popular Culture1

Introduction This article considers how imperialism, neocolonialism, and the stereotypical myth of Africa collide in popular culture at The Lost City, a South African theme park (figure 1). It argues that many of the visual and textual mechanisms that are used to suggest the notion of mythical Africa at this theme park can be traced back to the colonial gaze and the imperialist project. It has been suggested that certain colonialist codes of spatial organization have been internalized by the popular imagination, and surface in the manner in which theme parks habitually articulate space and structure narrative. The relevance of these ideas for the creators, consumers, and critics of entertainment spaces such as The Lost City is that these fantasy images position Africa in a specific manner as the site of consumption and entertainment. In so doing, entertainment landscapes have the capacity to effectively obscure true culture and history. In a postmodern world governed by postindustrial, multinational capitalism, it can be argued that an entertainment economy tends to choose the lowest common denominators, the most obvious stereotypes by which to render other cultures. This article suggests that these strategies are by no means innocuous, and are founded on ideological assumptions and mythic constructs that position The Lost City and, by extension, Africa as a definitive hallucinatory space of the colonial imagination. Indeed, it seems ironic that, while buzzwords such as postcolonialism and political correctness ostensibly inform interaction with culture and history, the colonial legacy continually asserts itself in popular culture and reinscribes a politics of power in the entertainment landscape. The theoretical underpinnings of this article are briefly outlined before a few salient points regarding theme parks and The Lost City are sketched. The mechanisms by which colonial powers exerted authority over colonial spaces then are examined in relation to The Lost City, substantiating the notion that cultural production is invariably ideologically inflected. I This article is based on a paper delivered at the Icograda Continental Shift 2001World Design Convergence Congress in Johannesburg, 1 1-14 September 2001.