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Cultural Politics in South Africa: An Inconclusive Transformation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Kenneth W. Grundy
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1996

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Footnotes

*

This is an expanded version of a paper read at the 20th Annual Conference on Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, 21 October 1994. The author would like to thank the Institute of Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa for their support while he was University Fellow there in 1989 and 1990. He is also grateful to the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve University for travel assistance on this project. Neither institution bears responsibility for the interpretations contained herein.

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