CONSUMER MAGAZINES IN SOUTH AFRICA AND ISRAEL

Abstract

The magazine appears to have been directed at a modernising, middle-class reading public actively engaged in promoting a culture of consumption. But this paper inquires into two sets of socio-cultural environments in which official, political economic determinants cannot fully account for the rise and successful publication of consumer magazines, nor for the consolidation of an operative magazine industry. The cases concern consumer magazines for black South Africans published roughly from the onset of apartheid to the present, and Israeli women's magazines published from the time of early-state Zionist-Socialist discourse till today. In neither case does the production of consumer magazines correspond with straightforward political economy analyses. To assess the cultural functionality and social standing of magazines, the paper takes a socio-semiotic approach incorporating socio-cultural determinants entailed in the way the consolidation of a commercial press comes to bear on the (re)production of individual selfhood and collective identity.