Raising Africa?: Celebrity and the Rhetoric of the White Saviour

The ‘White Saviour’ has long been a vehicle for celebrities in Hollywood film. From Lawrence of Arabia (dir. Lean 1962) to Blood Diamond (dir. Zwick 2006), from the Indiana Jones franchise that began in 1981 with Raiders of the Lost Ark (dir. Spielberg) to Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (dir. West 2001), actors perform roles as heroes who save the day against all odds and thwart dark and ominous adversaries (Shohat 1991; Shome 1996; Dyer 1997). Pop stars take on characters and ‘exotic’ identities as well, from the heroic, virginal, and steadfast, to the sexy, bad and ‘ethnic,’ as with Madonna’s Geisha, Evita or Indian Summer personas (Fouz-Hernández 2004). And with increasing visibility, the famous perform real-life hero roles as philanthropists who endorse and fund a variety of social causes around the so-called ‘developing’ world. This essay explores how the celebrity philanthropist is constructed as redeemer of distant Others and how this philanthropic role mingles with a celebrity’s on-stage personas to create the White Saviour, a powerful brand of contemporary cultural authority.

started Raising Malawi to build a high profile school similar to Oprah Winfrey's academy in South Africa. She later scaled the project back amid allegations of misuse of funds and partnered with an organization called BuildOn to build and renovate smaller schools in Malawi. Angelina Jolie's work as a United Nations goodwill ambassador highlights the issue of displaced people around the world, including in Africa. Both she and Madonna have also adopted children from African countries, a fact that gives them high-profile roles as famous mothers of needy children.
Celebrity philanthropy is, after all, about harnessing spectacle. Stars deliver media attention to social causes, often where government will is lacking. Celebrity can cut through the inertia of bureaucracy and governmental politicking, using social, symbolic and economic capital to draw affluent consumers and influential people to the social ills that define Africa in the Western mind. Bono is seen cajoling recalcitrant world leaders into making aid commitments. He has been photographed at the shoulder (or the knee) of presidents, prime ministers and popes. Bono, Madonna and Jolie all have the ear of powerful people.
Yet celebrity philanthropy in 'distant' locales, including in Africa, is fraught with ideological tensions given that no aid happens outside of the colonial legacy and postcolonial machinations that have left their mark on the continent. As publicity generated by famous people highlights the dire social and political inequities of our time, celebrity philanthropy in Africa generates a cultural authority that recentres whiteness, and in turn burnishes the celebrity brand. It does this recentring, I argue, by exoticizing nonspecific representations of African countries and peoples and by creating narratives of near-divine greatness about the celebrity.
In this paper I explore the discursive power evinced by Bono, Jolie and Madonna as key  (Bell 2013). I also examine Bono's Product (RED) campaign website and a 30-minute campaign film called The Lazarus Effect (dir. Bangs 2010). These examples demonstrate two particular discourses of speaking for, namely a narrative of religious salvation that is prominent in publicity of celebrity philanthropy and a related privileging of celebrity motherhood in the cases of Jolie and Madonna. A critical reading of these cases reveals the ways in which the celebrity gaze on Africa produces material benefits as it maintains a normative discursive space of whiteness. The cases also show the ways in which fame, as a production of 'ideal' race, class, gender helps reproduce the conditions of global capitalism through the media.
This essay is a call to examine how celebrities are part of a 'discursive formation' (Foucault 1972), everyday discourses that reproduce material life. In these examples the discourses include neo-colonial stereotypes of African peoples as passive and helpless. Nakayama and Krizek (1995) remind us that it is important to examine racial representations from the centres of power as well as from the margins, to decentre whiteness in order to make it visible. This analysis does not negate celebrities' desire to bring their fame to bear on global problems of human deprivation. They do make onthe-ground interventions in the spiral of poverty, illness and repression. Yet as they speak for Africa and for themselves, they employ a rhetoric of human communality that works in tension with their (perhaps unintentional) representation of Africans as Other.

Celebrity as cultural authority: Speaking for Africa
I represent a lot of [African] people who have no voice at all. In the world's order of things they are the people that count least … They haven't asked me to represent them. It's clearly cheeky but I hope they're glad I do and in God's order of things they're most important. Bono (Iley 2005) Celebrity as a phenomenon is a key source of cultural authority in contemporary life. It forms a triad with the media/culture industries and the public or audience, and each of the three is produced and enhanced by the others. Celebrity is, of course, a 'voice above others' (Marshall 1997: x). It is not surprising that people who have success in the entertainment industries would want to 'be a megaphone,' as George Clooney called it in an interview with CNN's Larry King (2010), for activists and workers engaged on the ground in troubled parts of the world. They have ready access to both media publicity and to the halls of power. To quote Clooney again, 'My job is to show up, because cameras follow me. That is the best way to spend my celebrity credit card' (Diehl 2010).
In short, celebrities have social and economic capital, and many of them use it to highlight the dire social problems of our day. Entertainment celebrity, as Clooney's remark suggests, is ultimately a commercial transaction. Individual stars are both brands and products, and they must remain salient in the public mind like other brands. Their celebrity must be constantly reproduced through their creative production and via their public/private lives. They do charity work, they endorse commercial products, they marry and divorce, and they rear children.
Increasingly they mete out tidbits about themselves via social media sites such as Twitter. All of these activities service the brand, feeding a parasocial relationship with fans. In other words, we feel we have a kind of relationship with famous people because of the publicity about them (Dyer 1986). And their branded personas generate a form of authority in the context of their relationship to fans and culture industry. This authority gives them media credibility to speak on behalf of distant Others.
Since entertainment celebrities derive their authority via their status as pop culture icons, their creative production works in tandem with their philanthropy and aspects of their 'private' lives to produce their personas (Marshall 2010). In short, we come to know them, or the public version of them, by way of both on-stage and off-stage performances.
Both aspects convey ideas and beliefs. Through celebrity we see the public and private realms of life cross, especially given that fans are as interested in what famous people do in life as in what they do on stage or screen (Dyer 1986: 8). This crossing of public and private is part of what generates their authority to speak on behalf of others.
Cultural production, as a site where ideologies are produced, maintained, challenged and transformed, has always been imbued with racialized, gendered, classed and nationalistic meanings. At the height of the British imperial project from the 18 th to 20 th centuries all socioeconomic classes connected to nation via popular culture and it was instrumental in maintaining empire in Britain (MacKenzie 1986;Richards 2001).
'Every aspect of popular culture contrived to instill pride in the British imperial achievement,' says music historian Jeffrey Richards. From novels to stage plays to music halls, and later in feature films, popular culture was 'about gallant imperial heroes showing the flag and quelling the rebellious natives in far-off dominions ' (2001: 2). Music was replete with jingoistic refrains. Postcards, magazine illustrations, advertising and commercial packaging were all geared to the nationalistic project of empire (see also McClintock 1995).
Richards writes that popular culture had an instrumental role in the colonial zeitgeist to 'reinforce the components of the ideological cluster that constituted British imperialism in its heyday: patriotism, monarchism, hero-worship, Protestantism, racialism and chivalry ' (2001: 525). Today, pop culture's role in shaping contemporary values is not diminished, although it is embedded in a somewhat reconfigured 'ideological cluster' of global capitalism. Components of the 21 st -century cluster include patriotism, celebrityworship, individualism, consumption and a post-racial colourblindness that obscures the racialized power dynamics at play. Now, with burgeoning media interest in celebrities' private lives, its meanings are equally embedded in the off-stage 'real' lives of entertainment celebrities as in their creative roles.
For the three celebrities discussed here, their creative production intermingles seamlessly with their charity work and the public performance of their private lives.
Their words and actions are read as representations of their personal views as expressed through traditional mass media and online in social media (Marshall 2010). The ideologies embedded in their creative work reach their fan bases more inferentially than does their philanthropy and self-promotion, yet the two streams of publicity feed each other and infuse their public personae. Jolie's films, with strong female heroes, are an aspect of her off-screen role as a philanthropist. The same can be said for Bono as front man in an iconic male rock band, and for Madonna with the ever-changing characters of her stage performances and recordings. Andrew Cooper suggests, for example, that Angelina Jolie's 'ability to mix art and real life' gives her a unique credibility (2008: 116). Her work as a star in adventure films, often in 'exotic' locales, bolsters her power as a celebrity ambassador. In fact, Jolie says her interest in the plight of refugees grew out of shooting on location in Cambodia (Jolie 2003). Likewise, her philanthropy burnishes her appeal as an actor. Reputation is a powerful factor for better and for worse. Jolie's decision with her partner, Brad Pitt, to birth their first biological child, Shiloh, in Namibia generated a measure of negative media coverage. Some media viewed it as a crass juxtaposition between their wealth and the privation in the country (O'Neill 2006). However, they have largely blunted such criticism through their philanthropic work. They have strategically managed an awareness of the power and privilege that he has explicitly used to put the issues of poverty, developing-world debt and AIDS on the public agenda. He is effectively suggesting that he is maintaining God's 'order of things.' It is a sort of 'meek shall inherit the earth' perspective, which he constitutes as a near-divine intervention to bring about a pre-ordained common good.
By speaking for the Other, Bono continues a long Western tradition of creating an 'undifferentiated subject,' as Gayatri Spivak (1988) describes the First World practice of conflating and mapping its desires and interests onto the subaltern. So-called First World representation presumes to speak for a generalized subaltern subject, with no distinctions from within. Such representation ventriloquizes the subaltern, produces a universal subject that matters only in relation to its capacity to serve the ventriloquist.

As Spivak puts it, 'This benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the
Third World as an Other is the founding characteristic of much third-worldism ' (1988: 289). In other words, Bono's speaking for does not, indeed cannot, acknowledge a differentiated post-colonial subject. To speak for is to maintain the order of things.
The examples discussed here constitute an ideological stance that defines a common good, valued in visitors' terms (Spivak 1990;Ogundipe-Leslie 2001 The Product RED campaign is an example of this sort of 'cure' without the diagnosis that would be afforded by a contextualized view of poverty and AIDS (Jungar & Salo 2008: 94). The campaign obliterates the colonial history and the context of the HIV/AIDS crisis from the picture it paints in order to create an aesthetic space for affluent consumers to buy their favourite brands, guilt-free. The campaign has said RED wanted to eschew the pictures of despair common to many charity projects (Perry 2008: 288-89 in Africa by 2015. The RED case, then, well exemplifies the tensions and contradictions within the celebrity gaze on Africa.
As these stars speak on behalf of distant Others in both an activist sense and through their creative output, they represent a contradiction between the desire to alleviate global problems of human privation and discourses that serve to reinforce the dire inequities of globalization. I explore two such discourses below: the frequent theme of Celebrity philanthropy is a mechanism through which stars speak for themselves as they speak for Others, where they claim authoritative voice regarding the problems of Africa and accumulate more cultural authority along the way.

Ubuntu: The mission to 'raise' Africa
When it comes to Africa, celebrities express their message of hope and salvation through a rhetoric of one-world communality.  In her film, Madonna says: 'Being in Africa has made me realize that suffering is subjective. There is an enormous amount of suffering here that is really tangible … And yet they have an appreciation and a joy and a gratitude that we could never understand' another, is the discursive space of the White Saviour in all of its 'functional invisibility' (Nakayama & Krizek 1995: 297 The film ultimately circles back to a we-they 'dichotomy,' as Madonna herself calls it: You get caught up in this dichotomy where you think 'If they could only understand what I understand then they could fix everything.' Then I look at the way they live and I think 'Oh God, they have illnesses and they have cultural traditions that seem antithetical to life but they're happy. And you could drive down a street in Beverly Hills and … and you don't see that kind of joy.
This characterization suggests that while poverty is primitive, it is where true joy flourishes. It is a curious invocation of the notion that 'money can't buy happiness' in the face of consumption-dependent modern celebrity.
These manifestations of the White Saviour narrative are sometimes overshadowed by the material impact of fund-raising projects such as Product RED and Raising Malawi.
Yet their racialized 'post-race' stance serves to maintain a neocolonial footprint on the continent and also posit individualistic responses to deep structural problems. The universalizing representations that flow from the cultural authority of celebrity ventriloquize the Other, to return to Spivak, and define the African subject's needs in the context of so-called First World ideologies such as the American Dream. Below I examine motherhood, a related post-identity narrative that is evident in contemporary philanthropy. Celebrities' deployment of their roles as mothers creates a strong brand of cultural authority that also has an unseverable link to the colonial past.

Mother Africa: Speaking for motherhood
Next we'll adopt …We don't know which country but we're looking at different countries. And it's going to be the balance of what would be best for Mad and for Z right now. You know, another boy, another girl, which country, which race, would fit best with the kids. Angelina Jolie (Cooper 2006) Angelina Jolie made the above remark during a feature interview with CNN's Anderson The privilege of her whiteness inheres in its invisibility. Its status is essentially that of non-race in that it appears to have a normative essence. 'Thus the experiences and communication patterns of whites are taken as the norm from which Others are marked,' as Nakayama & Krizek say (1995: 293). It is partly Jolie's normative invisibility as a white person, even though she is far from invisible as a famous actor, that gives her power. Her identity as someone seemingly without race is partly what enables her to make such a remark without challenge. Anderson Cooper never questions the presumption behind it; Jolie is seemingly a universal subject (Bell 2013).
As such, Jolie embodies a particular kind of 21 st century celebrity motherhood that is at once hip and edgy, doting and playful. She is a former goth turned working mom. The actor once wore a vial of then-husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood around her neck.
These days she cultivates a cleaned-up image on and off screen and her child rearing is very public. She and Pitt are frequently photographed with their six children in tow, which serves as a strategy for managing the intense media gaze that follows the Jolie-Pitt brand.
The CNN feature interview introduced her as 'the most famous mother in the world' (2006). She and Pitt have three biological children and three children adopted from the so-called Third World, from Cambodia (Maddox), Ethiopia (Zahara) and Vietnam (Pax).
Their biological daughter, Shiloh, was born in Namibia in 2006 amid the aforementioned media spectacle and criticism about the resources the small country was required to expend on ensuring the privacy and security of the famous couple. After Pax's adoption Jolie gave birth to twins in 2008 in Nice, France. The interview was recorded just four days after Shiloh's birth.
Madonna has four children, two of whom are adopted from Malawi. She has used her media access to blend her motherhood with her philanthropy, and to defend herself as an adoptive mother against some of the critiques ( presents herself as devoted and present mother. She is in control of her destiny and motherhood makes her a go-to expert on Africa because its children are in need. In a sense she has a diplomatic passport to pronounce on all things related to women and children, to speak for those perceived to be voiceless. She claims the privilege of white femininity and its presumption to speak for motherhood.
As this discussion suggests, motherhood is a loaded concept in terms of power relations.
It is pregnant with politically charged ideals of purity, race, class and belonging. There are 'real' mothers, legitimized as best suited for reproducing the American population and the 'alleged values of the U.S. nation-state,' Patricia Hill Collins says (2006: 55).
They are represented in all kinds of media as authentic, sincere, honest and reliable, but also as affluent, heterosexual, married, white and American. People of other races, classes, and positions are commonly framed against this ideal as inherently less fit.
Those ideals, as Hill Collins notes, can have direct material consequences for access to resources.
Motherhood has deep roots in the imperial project as well (Burton 1994). African women remain, 'at the heart of the discursive storms around voice and voicelessness,' when it comes to their lives as spouses and mothers, as scholar and activist Ogundipe-Leslie argues (2001: 135). In the 18 th and 19 th century colonial era, white motherhood was juxtaposed with non-white motherhood. By drawing distinctions from their colonial counterparts white European women could leverage their own aspirations and struggles (Mama 1997). Inequalities of race, class, gender worked together 'generating a repressive imperial ideology' that acted in and on European life (Mama 1997: 49). In fact, the First Wave feminist campaign for women's suffrage was built upon the argument that British women were moral and civilized creatures, and to deny them the vote was to cast them as no better than the 'primitive' women of the colonies who were subject to the brutality of their husbands and to backward cultural norms (Burton 1994 There is a particular self-referentiality in the mission of these celebrities. They frequently speak as mothers in their media interviews, as Jolie does in the interview with Anderson Cooper. Jolie's quote about choosing the birth country of her next adopted child displays a sense of ownership in that she has the run of the so-called Third World and a mandate to be the mother of its children. Behind her comment about choosing her next child is a tacit assertion that her philanthropy serves her parental desires, and vice versa. The CNN interview title itself, 'Angelina Jolie: Her Mission and Motherhood,' makes this symbiotic link between motherhood and missionary zeal, suggesting that her mission in Africa includes being a mother of its children. When Cooper asks Jolie about AIDS, it is in the context of the couple's fear that their adopted daughter Zahara would be HIV-positive (she was not). Jolie's discussion of the refugee conditions she has witnessed is tinged with an air of there but for the grace of God go I. It can be read as an expression of humility and grace, but it is also selfreferential to compare one's privilege to the suffering of others. She tells Cooper that she reminds herself of what the refugees endure each time she begins to feel negative about something in her life: 'Even just today, I was, you know, breast-feeding, and tired, and thinking, God, I really don't know how I'm going to get myself together to be thinking for this interview. But you think, Jesus, the things these people go through. I owe it to all of them to get myself together, to stop whining about being tired, and get there and get focused ' (2006). This sort of remark, while empathetic, also has the effect of juxtaposing her with, and distancing her from, the Other.
Madonna takes up the White Saviour stance directly through the name of her charity, Raising Malawi. It suggests a mission to lift up a poor nation, and to raise its people.
The characterization of Africans as childlike, in need of rearing and salvation, is a discourse that dates back at least to the slave trade. People were infantilized visually and in multiple forms of publicity directed at the citizens of colonizing countries (Burton 1994;McClintock 1995;Hall 1997 Madonna's film also highlights the personal help and support she gave to two other children. In one case a child named Luka had his genitals cut off in an attack. She helped him get the surgeries he needed and helped his family get a new home and places in a private school for Luka and his siblings. In another she helps a young orphan named Fanizo get into a posh private school. Her intervention is again decontextualized.
She does not set it in the context of other aid efforts or programs so it reads as an individual act by a privileged white woman. To say this is not to critique her desire to assist these or other children, but to suggest that her work reinscribes the legacy of the white mother that dates back to the colonial period.
These examples of celebrity motherhood mixing with philanthropy are a discourse of whiteness enabled by the cultural authority of these famous individuals. There is no inherent problem with deploying affective ways of knowing that flow from an aspect of life that has formerly been devalued, namely the private domestic realm of child rearing.
Yet in their deft blending of celebrity philanthropy and motherhood the stars are primarily constructing and maintaining their own brand (see Littler 2008) and asserting their power to define a common good that serves their own needs. Their representations help produce Africa as a large, amorphous locale replete with already-existing stereotypes of child-like primitivism that needs mothering. The self-referential nature of this publicity around their efforts sets these celebrities up as mother-saviours.

Afterword
Each of these examples demonstrates the complexity of celebrity involvement in Africa.
Famous people can make a material difference in the lives of those they encounter because of their roles as privileged travellers in a globalized world. In some ways celebrity advocacy has become the window on Africa for many Euro-North Americans.
It brings the media to places of need that would otherwise remain invisible to people who live in wealthy countries. The language of universal good and the material benefits of philanthropy in Africa make it challenging to critique celebrities' actions, and the underlying rhetoric of the White Saviour that operates in the background.
Yet as we excavate beneath the contradictory discourses of universality and individuality, and the representations of people in Africa in these cases, we unearth the white subject 'as the universal ubiquitous subject of humanity' (Shome 1996: 513). That universal subject speaks the 'truth' of Africa, and sanctions individuals in Africa to speak. The universal subject speaks for the mission of 'raising' Africa, and for the parents and children of Africa. This critique is aimed at theorizing the discursive as the material. The discursive space of whiteness in Africa must surely be examined as an impediment to Africans' long-term efforts to break the cycles established under colonial rule. The cases here are a part of those cycles through the celebrities' highly individualistic, and in some cases piecemeal, responses.
This is not to suggest that celebrity activism and philanthropy relating to distant locales can only ever be self-serving for the celebrity or disempowering for those who might be helped by their philanthropic efforts. This analysis is meant to be part of a conversation that challenges us to think about how celebrity charity work is a double-edged sword.
The same celebritized power that can force difficult social problems and political positions to the fore can be part of a rhetoric that shores up the status quo, in this case a timeworn portrayal of Africa as a place of singular primitive beauty and heartbreakingly intractable problems. Celebrity is a fact of contemporary life that is a deep well of raw power, as the publicity and fund-raising of these and other campaigns suggest. The question becomes how it is deployed or, rather, how it might be deployed in the service of progressive discourses that do not universalize or generalize the Other, that do not model one-off, self-referential solutions to enormously complex structural problems.