Archetyping race, gender and class: advertising in The Bantu World and The World from the 1930s to the 1990s

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.