Taylor Swift released her latest romantic video for a 1989 single at the MTV Video Music Awards this weekend and now it’s getting hit hard by critics. That’s because it’s set in Africa, without any Africans.
In the video for “Wildest Dreams,” which is up to 19.5 million views, Swift plays an actress in love with her co-star (Scott Eastwood) while they are filming a movie set in Africa. Viewers see wildlife and beautiful scenery from the continent, but there are no natives visible. It looks like the movie they are trying to make is Out of Africa, a movie also widely criticized for a romantic portrayal of colonialism, with almost no representation of the native population on screen.
As a result, several writers have criticised the video itself, 30 years after that film. The Daily Dot’s Nico Lang wrote that the video is “sadly indicative of its stars shoddy racial politics.” The Huffington Post’s Lauren Duca compared it to Pocahontas and said it “channels white colonialism.”
Director Joseph Kahn responded to the criticisms with a long statement released by Swift’s publicist to Entertainment Weekly. He explained that the music video concept “was that they were having a love affair on location away from their normal lives. This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950.”
Kahn also pointed out that many of the crew behind the scenes on the video are minorities.
“ I am Asian American, the producer Jil Hardin is an African American woman, and the editor Chancler Haynes is an African American man,” Khan said. “We cast and edited this video. We collectively decided it would have been historicially inaccurate to load the crew with more black actors as the video would have been accused of rewriting history. This video is set in the past by a crew set in the present and we are all proud of our work.”
And he also tweeted:
If this feels a bit like deja vu, it should. In August 2014, “Shake It Off” video director Mark Romanek had to defend that video since it was also called racist by some.
image courtesy of Peter West/ACE/INFphoto.com