In a recent article, Tarisha L. Stanley asked the question: ‘‘Can a mammy be a mammy if she builds girls' schools in Africa?'' This simple question captures the complex range of issues raised by Oprah's philanthropy. Chief among them are the power relations that inform charitable acts; the racial politics and history that structure Oprah's relationship to her viewers; the images of Africa in contemporary culture and how they help to frame her acts of charity; and the significance of Oprah as a transracial, transcultural, and transnational cultural icon. This essay argues that the rhetorical strategies that Oprah mobilized in defense of her decision to build the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy enact what I, borrowing from the work of Johannes Fabian, call a ‘‘politics of coevalness'' which, unlike most acts of charity directed at Africans, emphasizes that the philanthropist and the recipient share important dimensions of time, space, and experience. In particular, her insistence on making African girls, many of them motherless, the object of her affection and mother love-indeed, calling them her ‘‘surrogate daughters'' -radically disrupts the organizing principles that give the mammy stereotype its coherence. In so doing, she participates in the creation of what Catherine Squires calls ‘‘black counterpublic discourses'' that ‘‘travel outside of safe, enclave spaces to argue against the dominant conception of the group and to describe group interests. . . . Part of this process [is] to challenge dominant stereotypes of Blacks and recreate the group's wider public image to challenge the historical degradation of African American identities by the dominant White public.''

The essay thus begins with a brief discussion of the concept of the ‘‘denial of coevalness,'' linking it to slavery, colonialism, and the history of missionary work in South Africa. These historical conditions gave shape and texture to the public sphere-a domain that has been defined explicitly and implicitly as white. As Maguire explains, ‘‘the bourgeois public sphere . . . had a historically specific provenance and development. The same coffee houses that nurtured Habermas's seventeenth and eighteenth century bourgeois version gave birth as well to Lloyd's of London and other underwriters of the Atlantic slave trade.'' Winfrey's insistence on bringing these submerged histories to the forefront and making them the central organizing principle of her charity work account for why her actions merit the descriptor of ‘‘counterpublic,'' despite her dominant position in the American media.

Furthermore, they go some way to explaining the extremely negative responses and the harsh level of criticism she encountered when she made racism, sexism, and the specific degradations she suffered as a poor African-American woman the stagingground for her philanthropic endeavors in South Africa.

THE DENIAL OF COEVALNESS: CHARITY, CELEBRITY, AND THE CULTURE OF IMPERIALISM

Johannes Fabian uses the term ‘‘denial of coevalness'' to describe how anthropologists render indigenous people as not only inhabiting a different geographic space, but also a different temporal zone. He writes:

As a discipline of practices of making and representing knowledge, anthropology is marked by a contradiction. Anthropology has its foundation in ethnographic research, inquiries which even hard nosed practitioners . . . carry out with communicative interaction. The sharing of time that such interaction requires demands that ethnographers recognize the people whom they study as their coevals.

However, and this is where the contradiction arises-when the same ethnographers represent their knowledge in teaching and writing they do this in terms of a discourse that consistently places those who are talked about in a time other than that of the one who talks. I call the effect of such strategies the ‘‘denial of coevalness.''

The rhetoric that accompanies philanthropy, particularly when the objects of that philanthropy live in sub-Saharan Africa, frequently has the same effect. This is not surprising, given the fact that travel and evangelical writings were the earliest forms of ethnography. Turning specifically to South Africa, we find that Christian missionaries constantly depicted indigenous people as atavistic throwbacks who could be lifted out of their misery only by the charitable actions of benevolent Europeans. The idea of ‘‘branding'' a social movement or a philanthropist had its genesis in The Civilizing Mission, as enacted through the activism of abolitionists and missionaries, who were very strategic in how they staged, packaged and disseminated images of African suffering. Because the livelihood of the philanthropic enterprise and the philanthropist himself depended upon the ability to fund-raise, both movements are notable for the sheer quantity of print they showered on the English reading public. As Philip Curtin explained in his book, The Image of Africa, publicity was crucial to the fund-raising enterprise:

Publication was essential to the missions. Unlike the government or the traders, they lived on voluntary contributions. If the missions in the field were to continue their day to day operations, the missionary societies at home had to maintain a regular flow of contributions. . . . The link between publicity and fund raising was established early in the century.

The ideology of the ‘‘White Man's Burden,'' with its emphasis on ‘‘Christianity, Civilization, and Commerce,'' married philanthropy, entertainment, and consumerism.  Indeed, one of the hallmarks of colonialism and imperialist culture in South Africa was the manner in which the production of knowledge about race and sex, the production of celebrity, and philanthropy were deeply intertwined. South Africa is distinctive in that it was one of the first places where the narrative of imperial progress became a ‘‘mass-produced consumer spectacle.'' This process, which Anne McClintock terms ‘‘commodity racism,'' is distinct from earlier forms of scientific racism in that imperial expositions, museums, and zoos take their place alongside anthropological, scientific, and travel writing as key sites for the production of difference.

Ethnographic showcases wherein indigenous people were exhibited like zoological specimens were a critical space wherein black South Africans were depicted as existing in an anterior time. Sensationalism was the hallmark of this enterprise. As Jan Pieterse put it, ‘‘in colonial ethnography the colonized were turned into objects of knowledge, in the colonial exhibits they were turned into spectacles.'' During the heyday of imperialism, exhibits of so-called native peoples from South Africa were all the rage. A stroll through what the Illustrated London News of June 1847 called ‘‘the ark of zoological wonders''-Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly-yielded a view of ‘‘extraordinary Bush people brought from South Africa.'' Visitors to Regent Street could see ‘‘Bushmen in their trees'' and ‘‘savages engaged in the pursuits of their everyday life.''

Six years later, The Illustrated London News (28 May 1853) advertised a showing of ‘‘the preliminaries of Kaffir marriage and bridal festivities'' courtesy of a Mr. A. T. Caldecott, who returned from the Natal Colony with twelve Zulus in tow. Ethnographic showcases were intimately linked to the evangelical enterprise.

The publicity material that accompanied advertisements for colonial exhibits often made reference to famous missionaries and, likewise, missionaries counted on ethnographic showcases to further popular interest in missionary work in Africa. For example, an exhibit at Exeter Hall of five ‘‘Bushmen'' was advertised as being particularly addressed to those interested in ‘‘the all important questions of Christian mission and human civilization in that quarter of the globe [Southern Africa]'' (Athaneum, March 1853).

Ethnographic showcases were not merely celebrations of the global hegemony of Western economic and political power, but were also key players in the redefinition of the nature of knowledge and the individual's relationship to it. According to Veit Erlmann, ethnographic showcases incited what he calls ‘‘spectatorial lust'' whereby ‘‘empire and unreality [came to] constitute each other in ways rooted in the deepest layers of modern consciousness.'' The world itself came to be ‘‘conceived and grasped as though it was an exhibition.'' Because Africans were present as subjectmatter but absent as voices, what appeared to be honest transcription of their existential reality remained, however, completely untested by their own views.

It is important to think through the contemporary implications of this. Turning to the present, everywhere one looks, one can find the techniques and sensations associated with the ethnographic showcase-particularly when we consider the production of reality effects in discourses about Africa.

BRAND THE BELOVED COUNTRY: AFRICA IN CELEBRITY CULTURE

Whether it is Bono shilling for AIDS dollars, Angelina and Madonna toting their African offspring, Gwyneth Paltrow and David Bowie declaring that they are ‘‘African,'' or Matt and George rallying for Darfur, it appears that a new generation of philanthropists have taken up the ‘‘White Man's Burden.'' Indeed, Time Magazine declared 2005 ‘‘The Year of Charitainment.'' In ways that hearken back to the nineteenth century, knowledge about Africa is being produced and reproduced via the production of spectacles. Philanthropic impulses towards Africa have become a key way for celebrities to build their personal brands; thereby supporting the conflation of activism, philanthropy, and consumerism. As such, celebrity-produced spectacles are useful for thinking about how systems of knowledge, disciplines, and practitioners in Africa interact on grounds of inequality with the West.

Take, for example, a lead article about Africa that recently appeared in the Sunday New York Times ‘‘Style Section''-a section that is usually devoted to debating the merits of Birkin bags and Jimmy Choo shoes. Noting that Madonna was using images of AIDS-stricken African children as a backdrop during her concern performances, the author was led to remark that demonstrating concern about Africa, much like toting a Gucci bag or wearing a Prada shoe, was an indication of having cutting-edge style:

That Madonna should suddenly be casting an ice-blue eye toward Africa should hardly be surprising. After all, she has always known how to spot a trend. And much as it may strain the limits of good taste to say it, Africa-rife with disease, famine, poverty, and civil war-is suddenly ‘‘hot.''

The heightened interest in celebrity adoptions is also a useful example. Londa Schiebinger writes that, for a time, it was ‘‘fashionable among the wealthy to collect Africans as exotica-along with apes, camels, leopards, and elephants. Dukes paraded them as buglers and drummers in their militia, and noble families exchanged them as gifts, dressing them in gay uniforms to serve as butlers and maids, pages and coachmen.'' The Boston Globe ran a feature story about the increased interest shown by American families in adopting African children that echoed this colonialist viewpoint. The opening paragraph declared:

American couples are adopting more African children, prompted by an increase n the number of orphans, the end of wars, and even by movie star Angelina Jolie's adoption of a baby girl in Ethiopia last year, according to analysis and agencies that help place the children. . . . ‘‘We definitely see a spike in the number of adoptions from Africa,'' said Adam Pertman, executive director of a New York based advocacy group. . . . ‘‘Some of it is star-driven. After Angelina Jolie adopted a kid from Ethiopia, agencies got a spate of calls from parents wanting to know how to adopt a kid from Ethiopia.''

The Wall Street Journal likewise reported that ‘‘international adoptions by Americans have been escalating, with stars such as Madonna traveling abroad to adopt.'' A recent Bloomingdales catalogue was even blunter, declaring that ‘‘these days, adopting a foreign child is more chic than any premiere party.''

A very specific set of narratives about white American femininity and African dependency get mobilized in these discussions about adoption. These discourses strongly echo those produced during the course of the nineteenth century, when missionary work became an important vehicle for white European women to exercise agency and moral leadership in ways that did not threaten patriarchy or the gendered division of labor. As Nancy Rose Hunt explains:

European women were to have a double and connecting role, intended to instill a sense of propriety in white males and save the honor of the colonial power while also serving as a model for and teacher of African women. . . . The heroic image of the arduous, monotonous lives of white women in the colonies evoked numerous burdens as well as endless devotion. . . . Charitable activity directed at [African] mothers and children was considered an appropriate, honorable activity for white women. It would also prevent boredom and idleness.

These days, American women are celebrated less for teaching African women how to mother than they are for usurping the roles of African women through a variety of discursive strategies that reinforce the idea that it is both necessary and appropriate for white women to inhabit the subject position of, and ventriloquize for, African women-thus rendering them invisible and voiceless. We might, for example, consider two recent ad campaigns. One in the British newspaper, The Independent, featured the supermodel, Kate Moss, made up to look like an African woman in order to highlight the battle against AIDS in Africa. The second ad-a popular campaign for the Keep a Child Alive organization (www.keepachildalive.org), which supports AIDS initiatives-features Gwyneth Paltrow in war paint and beads, proclaiming ‘‘I am African.'' Hannah Pool, a black British commentator, quite correctly asks the question what exactly these ‘‘blacked-up'' white celebrities are meant to portray. She continues:

I suppose it is meant to be subversive, but what does it say about race today when a quality newspaper decides that its readers will only relate to Africa through a blacked-up white model rather than a real-life black woman? What does it say about the fight against HIV/AIDS if that is the only way to make us care?

Oprah's gestures towards South Africa must be read and analyzed against this backdrop. When we do, it becomes clear that Oprah's brand of philanthropy departs from the usual Hollywood tradition in a myriad of ways. First, the manner in which she mobilizes the rhetoric of mother love and ‘‘other mother'' love powerfully disrupts the ‘‘mammy'' stereotype by prioritizing the needs of African girls and children over those of white women and children. Second, the way in which she describes what motivates her philanthropy-her own experiences of sexual abuse, racial discrimination,and lack of mother love-are examples of philanthropy motivated by recognition. The ways in which she connects American racism, slavery, and what Gilroy calls the ‘‘complicity of racial terror with reason'' to her philanthropic efforts not only makes her brand of philanthropy unique, but also make her an exemplary instance of how a black counterpublic discourse gets mobilized. Finally, her frequent invocation of her admiration for Nelson Mandela, and the consultative way in which she went about the construction of the Academy, depart radically from the usual model of Western philanthropy (especially that of American celebrities), which refuses to acknowledge or draw upon African expertise.

‘‘I SEE IN THESE GIRLS' FACES THE LIGHT OF MY OWN'': OPRAH'S POLITICS OF (RE)COGNITION

In the January 2007 edition of O Magazine, Oprah described her relationship to the South African girls at her academy thus:

My cup runneth over as I see in these girls' faces the light of my own. I know now why I never had children: These are the daughters I've been coming to my whole life. I am blessed to be able to feed, clothe, nurture, and inspire them, and provide teachers and counselors who will do the same.

In explaining why she built the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy, Winfrey frequently describes herself as inhabiting two distinct, yet interrelated, subject positions. First, that of a surrogate mother providing love and care to young black women, many of whom, like Winfrey, do not have relationships with their biological mothers.

‘‘Who do you live with?'' Oprah asks each girl. Often the list fails to include a parent: instead it is a grandfather, an aunt, a cousin. Many have lost a parent to AIDS, some have been raped, others abandoned. ‘‘Where is your mother?'' Oprah asks one girl. ‘‘Nobody knows, ma'am.'' Oprah continues, ‘‘That must be very hard for you.''

‘‘These are my girls and I love them, every one of them,'' Winfrey said in her inauguration speech on the Academy's opening day.25 Likewise, Newsweek reported that:

Gayle King has her own theory as to why her friend has become obsessed with the school. ‘‘When I watched Oprah with those girls,'' she says, ‘‘I kept thinking she was meant to be a mother, and it would happen one way or another.'' Indeed, Oprah constantly refers to her students as ‘‘my girls,'' and she really means it. . . . She's going to build a house on the school grounds-and she'll use the same dishes, sheets and curtains that the students do. ‘‘I want to be near my girls and be in a position to see how they're doing,'' Oprah says. ‘‘I want to have a presence they can sense and feel comfortable with.'' The bonding has already begun. Recently, when Oprah had finished interviewing for the day, she escorted the girls back to their bus and gave each of them a big hug. One girl, Thelasa Msumbi, held on extra tight, then whispered in Oprah's ear: ‘‘We are your daughters now.''

Criticisms of Winfrey have centered on her ostensible ‘‘mammy'' relationship to her white American female viewers. As Harris and Watson put it:

[Critics] have charged her [Winfrey] with enacting the racially loaded persona of the ‘‘mammy'' for white consumption. As evidence, they point to her on-air behavior: crying with her audience, indoctrinating them into the black vernacular, sharing African-American communal knowledge, and-in 1994, following the adoption of a new format designed to facilitate self improvement-ministering to them.

There are, no doubt, whites who do insist on seeing Oprah as a mammy figure. The instructional stance she takes towards white women, as well as her physical size, do evoke the racially charged history of female caretaking in American culture. Particularly in the first few seasons of her talk show, viewers were encouraged to interpret Winfrey within the long-standing cultural conventions whereby large, nurturing black women are expected to ‘‘complement white womanhood . . . comfort [their] white betters, [and] offer advice.''

It is precisely this racial history, however, that makes her stance towards African girls potentially much more radical than it initially appears. Her expressed desire to be a surrogate mother to African girls is, when read against the history of the mammy and the mammy stereotype, a significant reversal. What makes her relationship to the South African girls not only different from that between herself and her white audience, but also disruptive of the traditional mammy stereotype, is the manner in which Winfrey engages in what Fabian calls a politics of ‘‘recognition as re-cognition.'' This way of knowing and understanding the relationship of the Self to the Other and, in so doing, establishing coevalness, requires drawing on the ‘‘creative'' and ‘‘subversive'' potential of memory so that we can ‘‘remember those who are strangers to us.'' For Fabian, remembrance plays a key role in the production of knowledge about other societies that allows for the intersubjective sharing of time and space. Indeed, he calls for a change in the politics of ethnographic inquiry that places emphasis on ‘‘re-cognition'' as cognizing and remembering, or ‘‘recognition as remembering.'' This emphasis on the creative and potentially subversive uses of memory is a critical part of African-American feminist epistemology, and is central to Oprah's project.

In an essay on ‘‘Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,'' Gayle Greene observes that Toni Morrison's Beloved is a typical example of how African-American women use ‘‘memory and narrative as a means to liberation.'' Winfrey, who frequently describes Morrison as one of her most significant mentors, engages in just this sort of recognition as re-cognition when she enacts her second subject position, that of the motherless, abused black child. Invoking that position allows her to see herself both as mothering these African girls and as being a young, motherless, girl herself. As she explained in the January 2007 issue of her magazine:

‘‘It is a complete full circle for my life, because I was raised exactly like them, by a grandparent, poor, in a rural community in a state of apartheid. I understand where they come from. They've given me a sense of great hope! Their names are unusual, some are hard to pronounce-Lindiwe, Thando, Lebohang-but I'm looking into the face of myself.''

Although a number of critics have assailed Winfrey for her privileging of the white subject in the structure and content of her show, an equally powerful current in her self-presentation is her deep understanding of the powerlessness and voicelessness of the African-American female child. ‘‘I understand what it means to grow up poor, to grow up feeling you are not loved . . .'' Winfrey said, in her opening-day speech at the academy. In Journey to Beloved, the diary she kept while making the movie version of Morrison's novel, she reflected on how her history made it difficult for her to connect with the sense of mother love exuded by Sethe, the character she played in the movie:

I realized I had no place to go to conjure up feelings of the unconditional love a mother has for her daughter. I couldn't fathom what that would feel like. Sethe tucks in her daughters-the simplest of acts. J. D. [Jonathan Demme, director] commented that I was handling the pillows like rocks. He said, ‘‘You know what it feels like to be tucked in bed by your mother.'' I realized: I have never had that experience. And never imagined it until this moment.

Likewise, she told Newsweek: ‘‘I wanted to be able to give back to people who were like I was when I was growing up. I wanted this to be a place of honor for [the students], because these girls have never been treated with kindness.''

It is this connection to community, and to a shared experience of suffering, that poses the most significant challenge to the characterization of Oprah as a mammy. As Stanley reminds us, ‘‘part of the mammy icon's usefulness to antebellum society was that she conveyed a black mothering that privileged its relationship with white children while negating the black mother's love and commitment to her own children.'' Thus, in directing her love and attention to black children and reaffirming the necessity of love to and for black girls, she challenges the idea that black girls are not worthy of occupying a privileged subject position. She also reaffirms the importance of remembering the specific struggles and experiences of women-in particular, gendered forms of violence-in the construction of African-American collective memory. As Elsa Barkley Brown explains, these experiences are often submerged and forgotten.

While appropriately focusing attention on the physical, economic and social violence which surrounds and engulfs many black men in the late twentieth century United States, much of this discussion trivializes, or ignores, the violence of many black women's lives-as victims of rape and other forms of sexual abuse, murder, drugs and alcohol, poverty and the devastation of AIDS.

Thus, another way in which Winfrey challenges the mammy stereotype is through her connection to the global black community. Mammies, Stanley explains, were ‘‘best known for being disconnected from [their] community.''38 Winfrey, however, can be seen as engaging in a project of diasporic community-building via the creation of black counter public space where African and African diasporic histories that are obscured, submerged and denied are brought to the forefront in potentially radical ways.

For the rest of the essay and references please contact the author through The Zeleza Post