Abstract:
Picture postcards originated in the nineteenth century as an efficient, cheap,
and democratic form of mass communication that encompassed many
functions, including entertainment. As bimodal texts, comprising a visual
image, a nchoring textual c aption, a nd (sometimes) th e w ritten m essage by
the sender, postcards assumed the power to communicate complex ideas
and ideologies in a compact format. Under the influence of cultural studies
in the 1960s, which stated that culture itself is the site of struggle for social
meanings expressed in class, race, and gender relations, postcard studies
(deltiology) has become an important interdisciplinary field since the 1980s.
The postcard exposed millions of people to visual culture and predated the
functions of mobile phones, the Internet, and social media platforms such
as Instagram.
In this article, I focus on a series of artist-drawn, lithographic postcards by
Dennis Santry (1879-1960) in Cape Town in 1904. They depict six so-called
“Cape Girls” engaged in leisure activities against the backdrop of iconic
Capetonian sites. My interpretation of the postcards suggests that a selective
story privileges the tastes of a white, middle-class, English-speaking,
imperial audience.
Description:
NOTES : Because postcards ‘operate across boundaries of class, gender, nationality, and race, [they]
bring into question notions of authority, originality, and power’ (Prochaska & Mendelson 2010:xi).