Postcards of “Cape girls” : telling an Edwardian story of Cape Town

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.