By: Ellen C. Caldwell
for JSTOR Daily
Beautiful urban cityscapes, peaceful sunsets, laughing friends, hot couture fashion, and memes filled with humor and social commentary: this is not what most of the world thinks of when they picture Africa. NPR recently highlighted an emerging hashtag trend that Twitter users are implementing as a counter-attack to widely accepted images of African suffering.
#TheAfricaTheMediaNeverShowsYou offers positive photos from Africa to combat the overdone and harmful stereotypes rife in international media.
This emerging trend is particularly interesting in relation to past, present, and prevalent images of what Arthur and Joan Kleinman call “cultural appropriations of suffering.”
With their satirical viral video Radi-Aid: Africa for Norway, The Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund, pose the question, “If we say Africa, what do you think about? Hunger, poverty, crime or AIDS? No wonder, because in fundraising campaigns and media that’s mainly what you hear about.”
Between such campaign-driven media representations and the proliferation of predominantly white “voluntourism” photos abound in social media, Kleinman and Kleinman’s 1996 analysis of “the dismay of images” of suffering is more relevant than ever…