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The Chimalpahin Conference 2007: Colonial and Post-Colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness October 16 - 18, 200 7
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Fanta-sizing Cultures. A Contemporary Media Representation of Otherness Department of Political Science The object of my
analysis in this article is the new Fanta’s advertising campaign for
Italy that was launched in 2006. The spot that I have chosen as case in
point holds the Hawaiian culture, its language and people up to ridicule.
Not only it does utilize a familiar colonialist approach, mixing different
stereotypes related to tropical environments to describe Hawai'i, but also
it employs crucial elements of Hawaiian culture, such as the Volcano, the
Ocean, the sense of Community and the Hula
to sell a product, the Fanta soft drink; within this burlesque
representation, even the Humuhumunukunukuapua’a, the name of the fish
symbol of those islands, is reduced to a nickname for one of the
protagonists supposed to represent Hawaiians, like in one of those 50’s
films in which the white actors play as blackface. Those films in Italy
were dubbed and made in poor Italian, characterized by consistent use of
the infinitive tense as clear indication of the “native’s savagery”. For Pacific Islanders
probably those descriptions contextualized in the spot bring to mind
visions of colonialists practices, reflections of imperial politics which
recur since the 18th century; but for inhabitants of the
Italian peninsula, whom those images were directed to, they may evoke
stories of distant people, figures of tall, tanned, good mannered
“savages” who live in grass huts, eat fish, wear leaf costumes and
play nice music. At least part of my task
is to understand how media promotion of leisure products reinforces the
colonial viewpoint of post-colonial cultures, explaining from its own
perspective, the framework of that social practice which becomes
meaningful to an outsider. Starting from this
particular case I attempt to apply and develop some of Gramsci’s
conceptualizations to global post-colonial societies; I sustain that
corporations are today substituting states as dominators of those arenas
where consent, the most essential requirement of hegemony according to
Gramsci, is formed and diffused. Nowadays, corporations give things and
words, influencing culture, language and structure in a long-term strategy,
first delineated in the period of European colonialism. In other words, I
am interested in the process that alienates the colonized referent of the
commodity tendered to the outsider, from his/her own historical memory. This schizophrenic
social condition is the product of the colonizer’s traditional
insistence on difference from the colonized who deliberately typify a
notion of the savage as “Other”, which represents the antithesis of
civilized values. What we
call colonial discourse is not a definite and monolithic system of
description, but a series of infinite colonial approaches adapted every
time to a specific historical period. The portrayal of tropical paradise
promoted by Fanta Inc., takes us back to the early stages of Western
modern imperial expansion; where once there was a writer, here is a
director who acquires an ethical position in regard to his own culture and
the other’s. |
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