Cultural Politics in South Africa: An Inconclusive Transformation

Abstract

This is an account of how artists and cultural workers have striven to gain and maintain the freedom to produce art in a milieu that threatened to either exploit their labors for political ends or to marginalize them as unimportant and unworthy of public and private patronage and support. It also seeks to explain how they have organized and sought to expand their influence and independence. Cultural politics has many dimensions, including the larger issues of defining and enriching the values and purposes of a community, establishing the identity and parameters of the community and its culture, and locating the bounds of social and political discourse. Such a perspective takes culture in its most expansive sense—the concepts, habits, arts, skills, languages and institutions of a people. This article will focus on a more narrow view of cultural politics—the struggle over who represents the communities of cultural workers and practitioners, particularly in their dealings with the state and other dominant institutions, and how those communities have coalesced to pursue their perceived interests. Thus, culture is a synonym for those fine and popular arts that reproduce and reinforce systemic values, and those that corrode and undermine the social regime. And it is the battle for the control of the arts and those who create and disseminate the arts that will be examined here.