Journal article
Looking at listening: gender and race in commercial advertising for radio sets in Southern Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s
- Abstract:
- This article takes a visual approach to the study of an aural medium. It argues that the radio set had a powerful visual presence in popular culture in Southern Africa between the 1950s and the 1970s when most people bought their first radio sets. Advertisements for radios carried by the press offer the most prominent examples of this iconography. In South Africa, Rhodesia and Zambia, radio advertisements developed a distinctive aesthetic that blended global and local influences and framed the relationship between the new technology and society. Although the radio set was presented as part of a forward-looking, ostensibly inclusive vision of modernity, sales strategies also served to associate radio with whiteness and masculinity by looking backwards to the racial and gendered hierarchies of the colonial past. The homogeneity of advertising on both sides of the liberation divide demonstrates the pervasive cultural influence of settler colonialism both before and after formal decolonisation.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
-
-
(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.3MB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1080/13696815.2023.2262940
Authors
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis
- Journal:
- Journal of African Cultural Studies More from this journal
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 74–93
- Publication date:
- 2023-10-18
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-10-02
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
1469-9346
- ISSN:
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1369-6815
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1552146
- Local pid:
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pubs:1552146
- Deposit date:
-
2023-10-23
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Brooke, P
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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