'Imagined community' : 1950s kiekies of the volk

Abstract

This article investigates aspects of the cultural and gendered conceptualisation of the Afrikaner 'imagined community' as depicted on the covers of Huisgenoot in the 1950s. The reason this article is concerned with the covers from the 1950s is related to the particular tension between idealism and profit at that time in South Africa. This tension, played out on the covers of Huisgenoot in the 1950s, situates the magazine at the point of intersection faced by the Afrikaner community between a vernacular politics and identity and a secular, globalised paradigm. On the one hand, for instance, the abundance of visual advertisements in the 1950s issues embodies the South African culmination of what Daniel Boorstin (1961) terms the Graphic Revolution and the rise of mass culture production. This phrase refers to the explosion of mass produced imagery that dominated the previously word-orientated western world from the mid-nineteenth century onwards.