One F***Ing Tree!
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
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| Image past times Simon Stevens |
Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents as well as skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story close mass design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either develop inwards Africa or written past times African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, past times writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orangish sunset over the veld, or both.
“In short,” the post service said, “the covers of most novels ‘about Africa’ look to convey been designed past times person whose main stance of the continent comes from The Lion King.”
Like most Americans, mass designers tend non to know all that much close the residual of the world, as well as since they don’t e'er convey the fourth dimension to response to a mass on its ain terms, they resort to visual clichés.
The diagnosis:
We’re comfortable amongst this visual icon of Africa because it’s safe. It presents ‘otherness’ inwards a means that’s piece of cake to understand.
Change comes slowly. One day, Mendelsund [Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate fine art manager of Knopf] predicts, in that place volition hold upward a best-selling novel past times an African author that happens to purpose a dissimilar visual aesthetic, as well as its success volition innovate a novel develop of arbitrary images to correspond Africa inwards Western eyes. “But correct now, we’re inwards the historic menstruum of the tree,” he says. “For that vast continent, inwards all its diversity, yous buy the farm that i fucking tree.”