Ministry of Tourism ad from 1968
The copy: Let’s assume I’m an island.
I’ve got a casino that looks like /
the Taj Majal.
Golf courses men adore.
And if skin divings your pleasure. I’ve got that too. The best in the world.
I’m Grand Bahama Island just 2 1/2 hours from Times Square and that’s what I call conveniently located.
700 Bahama Islands.
This print ad appeared in United States magazines sometime in 1968. It was produced by the Interpublic Group advertising agency, at the time one of the largest such firms in the world. The blatant gendering and sexualizing of the islands is obvious. Almost too obvious.
I find the ad unsettling for other reasons. What you have to remember is that these were the first attempts from a representative black government in the Bahamas to create its own imagery to promote itself. I need to go back and check, but I can’t imagine that the ads that came before were any more demeaning.
A question: how much of this was the government’s input and how much was ultimately dictated by the foreign advertising agency?
This quote from Ian Strachan’s Paradise and Plantation, although analyzing a very different artifact from a more modern era, seems oddly appropriate… “The land is feminized. The woman awaits a companion, and her virtual nudity is a sign that she is willing to be sexually penetrated. She is already being visually consumed. She seems to be asleep. She must therefore be awakened just as the land must be stirred from its inertia, its unprofitableness, by the conqueror’s will.”