Editorial

Abstract

The first two articles in this issue of Image & Text consider current and recent conceptions and visual expressions of cultural and national identity respectively. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall's suggestion that identification is never a settled question, but rather something informed by historically specific developments and based on fantasy, projection and idealisation, is ably demonstrated by Stella Viljoen's article Imagined Community: 1950s kiekies of the volk. The article investigates ideas of cultural and gendered identity held by the Afrikaner community in the 1950s and their visual articulation in a selection of covers from the magazine Huisgenoot published during that decade. Viljoen maintains that the 1950s may be considered a significant period in the formation of Afrikaner cultural identity. It marked a watershed in the transition from a vernacular politics and identity to a secular, globalised paradigm where Afrikaner cultural identity and its visual manifestations increasingly align with westernised ideas and mass-produced imagery. Concomitantly the rhetoric of aspirational romanticism that characterised earlier covers of the magazine, shifted to a rhetoric of populist consumption.