Just a few minutes before the MTV VMAs began on Sunday night, Taylor Swift debuted her new music video for “Wildest Dreams.” I laughed at it – go here to read. I thought it featured some hilarious “acting” from Tay-Tay and that she managed to make Scott Eastwood look somewhat charismatic. Here’s the video again:

While I didn’t mention it at the time, I did wonder if this video was going to create some kind of backlash about colonialism or all of these white people singing twee love songs with “Africa” in the backdrop. While I think Taylor has some racial sensitivity issues to deal with (I’m still bothered by some of those scenes in “Shake It Off”), I also “got” what she was trying to do with this music video in particular. Her idea really was to play a 1950s-style actress having an on-location love affair with an actor while they were shooting a film in an African country. Does they video come across as whitewashed? Of course. But the 1950s were whitewashed too and that was the reference. Still, NPR’s Viviane Rutabingwa has written a piece called “Taylor Swift Is Dreaming Of A Very White Africa.” Part of the piece:

In [the video], 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.

We 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 people 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.

To those of us from the continent who had parents or grandparents who lived through colonialism (and it can be argued in some cases are still living through it), this nostalgia that privileged white people have for colonial Africa is awkwardly confusing to say the least and offensive to say the most…

Swift’s music is entertaining for many. She should absolutely be able to use any location as a backdrop. But she packages our continent as the backdrop for her romantic songs devoid of any African person or storyline, and she sets the video in a time when the people depicted by Swift and her co-stars killed, dehumanized and traumatized millions of Africans. That is beyond problematic.

[From NPR]

While I see the argument being made here – and God knows I’m not a Swifty Apologist – I do think that there’s one critical piece missing: Taylor isn’t playing a colonialist. In the video, she’s playing an actress doing a movie that is colonialist. The movie-within-the-video is the colonialist nightmare. Of course, you could maybe make the argument that it was simply a terrible idea to do a film-within-a-video and base it on a colonialist ideal, AND have the video set in, like, some kind of 1950s all-white production.

The Daily Dot also had an interesting analysis of the video – go here to read. And the video’s Asian-American director has defended the video – go here to read. This is the key line: “This is not a video about colonialism but a love story on the set of a period film crew in Africa,1950.” Yes, that’s what I said. I mean, go ahead and say that Swifty was dumb to greenlight the video, but I really don’t think her aim was to make neo-colonialism more palatable. She wasn’t even thinking about it in that way, which is the larger problem here.

Photos courtesy of WENN.