Taylor Swifts'‘Wildest Dreams’ Video Set in Africa- What's Strikingly Missing Has People Talking....

Taylor Swift is taking heat again from a number of publications that are attacking her newest music video for the song “Wildest Dreams,” which is set in Africa.

The video is meant to portray a glamorous retro Hollywood movie shoot packed with wild animals, a love interest, and of course, heartbreak.

The video for American singer Taylor Swift's new song "Wildest Dreams" has been viewed more than 10 million times in the two days since it debuted.

The video was shot in Africa and California.

In it, we see two beautiful white people falling in love while surrounded by vast expanses of beautiful African landscapes and beautiful animals — a lion, a giraffe, a zebra.

Taylor Swift is dressed as a colonial-era woman on African soil. With just a few exceptions, the cast in the video — the actors playing her boyfriend and a movie director and his staff — all appear to be white.

Their issue with the video? There are is “nary a black person in sight” in the Africa-themed video, according to Gawker Media’s Jezebel. 

The Huffington Post’s Lauren Duca wrote that Taylor Swift “Channels White Colonialism” in her newest feature.

Duca explained in her article on the subject:

“Instead of the cultural appropriation that has become almost status quo in today’s pop music, Swift has opted for the bolder option of actually just embodying the political exploitation of a region and its people. It’s brave, really. Almost as brave as moving sensuously in the vicintiy of a real-life lion.”

“For a clip that’s set in Africa — it’s about as white as a Sunday morning farmer’s market.”

“The video wants to have its old-school Hollywood romance but ends up eating some old-school Hollywood racism, too. Just because you represent the past or pay respect to it doesn’t mean you need to recreate its worst aspects.”

Swift won Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Award’s last weekend for her song “Bad Blood” which featured 18 famous co-stars and a very high production value.
Many are shocked to think that in 2015, Taylor Swift, her record label and her video production group would think it was OK to film a video that presents a glamorous version of the white colonial fantasy of Africa. Of course, this is not the first time that white's have romanticized colonialism: See Louis Vuitton's 2014 campaign, Ernest Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro, the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia and of course Karen Blixen's memoir Out of Africa.

But it still stings.

Swift's "Wildest Dreams" are a visual representation of what the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina writes about in his Granta Magazineessay, "How to Write About Africa.

Here are some facts for Swift and her team: 

• Colonialism was neither romantic nor beautiful. It was exploitative and brutal. 
• The legacy of colonialism still lives quite loudly to this day. 


• Scholars have argued that poor economic performance, weak property rights and tribal tensions across the continent can be traced to colonial strategies. So can other woes. 
• In a place full of devastation and lawlessness, diseases spread like wildfire, conflict breaks out and dictators grab power.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don't get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn't care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular."

What do you think? Is Taylor Swift’s newest music video racist? Or is this just a case of people overthinking a pop video?

***Incidentally, all proceeds from the video go the African Parks Foundation of America, a wildlife conservation fund.