Abstract
This article sets out to interrogate the ideological hegemony of the superstructuring narrative voice in advertisements by studying linguistic, structural devices and encoding that are employed, in order to expose its racial, class and gender undertones embedded in the authorial voice. The sample of advertisements discussed is derived from The Bantu World and its two sequels, The World and The Sowetan. The sample is thinly dispersed over a period of five decades. Most of the advertisements selected were duplicated in the sister newspapers, Mochochono (Sesotho) and Imvo (isiXhosa), which were published under the auspices of the Associated Bantu Press. In the latter case the advertisements in the different languages were directly translated from English. The thrust of our argument is that the narrative voice, together with the images, are loaded with a stereotyping preconceived notion of the “other”, which is either conscious or subconscious. We also suggest that the change of the newspaper’s name is accompanied by a perceptible evolution of ideological bias in both the images and the narrative voice.
Highlights
The proceedings of a marketing and advertising convention which was held in Cape Town in 1964 (Parker, 1964:7-8) made it explicit that advertisers present viewed the South African market a black-andwhite dichotomy; by the hedge that Jan van Riebeeck planted at the Cape when he arrived and settled in the middle of the seventeenth century, to separate the new settlers from the indigenous inhabitants
One of the brief presentations sought in particular to address the question of the Bantu
We find in it the dominant voice that appropriates and ventriloquises the African voice, mainly because the white South African community was meant to overhear the discourse that was going on in the newspaper
Summary
The proceedings of a marketing and advertising convention which was held in Cape Town in 1964 (Parker, 1964:7-8) made it explicit that advertisers present viewed the South African market a black-andwhite dichotomy; by the hedge that Jan van Riebeeck planted at the Cape when he arrived and settled in the middle of the seventeenth century, to separate the new settlers from the indigenous inhabitants. The convention looked back to trends in marketing and advertising strategies. One of the brief presentations sought in particular to address the question of the Bantu (as Africans were called at the time). N h la n l a M a a k e is D ir e c t o r i n t h e o f f ic e o f t h e c a m p u s r e c t o r , V a a l T r i a n g le Campus, North-West University.
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