black titanic 85music video clip—are inspired by Cameron’s movie and for at least three
different reasons: the movie’s very fame as the most successful film ever
made; the melodramatic love story built around two lovers from differ-
ent social classes; and the allegorical potential of the trope of the sinking
ship, which actually transcends not only Cameron’s film but, to a certain
extent, also the myth of the Titanic itself. First and foremost, the four re-
mediations try to capitalize on Cameron’s success. Like most of the copies
I discuss in this book, they are commodities, produced and distributed by
African cottage culture industries. To boost their sales, and sometimes
the ideologies or beliefs they promote, cultural producers tie their own
products to a foreign “best seller,” hoping their products will thus cash in
on the popularity and fame of the original.
However, the copies discussed pirate the Titanic for more than just
economic gain. Ships lend themselves to plays of thought and therefore
make for excellent allegorical material. From the Bible’s ark to Apollo-
nius’s Argo, Melville’s Pequod, and Géricault’s raft, watercraft have figured
prominently in narratives and works of art throughout history. According
to Michel Foucault (1986: 27), “the boat” has served Western civilization
for a very long time not only as a powerful economical tool but also as the
“greatest reserve of the imagination.” Ships may come to symbolize whole
societies, whose inherent social conflicts are embodied by the passengers
aboard. But such vessels may as well take on the qualities of “heteroto-
pias,” spaces of otherness which are neither here nor there and thus serve
as an ideal medium for utopian thought. Hence, Foucault (1986: 27) calls
the ship “the heterotopia par excellence.” Cameron’s Titanic matches this
tradition perfectly. The love story built around the two fictional char-
acters of Rose and Jack is essentially utopian. It is a romance across the
class divide—“Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic,” as Cameron allegedly
called his project during its initial stages (Bernstein 1999: 18). Moreover,
Cameron’s mise-en-scène for this romance is a melodrama that plays out
openly the conflict between collective social norms and the individualis-
tic antisocial force of love. It resonates perfectly with African audiences.
Beginning with the Onitsha market literature of the 1950s (Obiechina
1973), popular genres all over Africa have reflected along similar lines on
the social conflicts inherent to African modernities (Larkin 1997).