Oktober—November 2024

From Cultural Work to Culture Industry: Affect, Labour and the Remaking of South Africa’s Arts Sector

Lee Walters recently submitted a PhD dissertation titled “From Cultural Work to Culture Industry: Affect, Labour and the Remaking of South Africa’s Arts Sector” in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, University of the Western Cape (UWC). The dissertation draws attention to historical, structural, psychosocial and affective dynamics in South Africa’s art and culture worlds. Walters is also a fellow at UWC’s Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). As one of the coordinators of the CHR’s Sound Working Group, Lee is convenor of “Oscillations: Sonic Inquiries and Practices” which is a joint project between the Akademie der Künste, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and the CHR. She has held curatorial and management positions at several art institutions, including Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council, Southern Africa, and UJ Arts at the University of Johannesburg. While at the CHR, Lee has been a visiting scholar in residency at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and at the University of Minnesota’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Global Change.

In her current project, Walters seeks to better understand the makeup, terrain and negotiations at play in arts worlds where the politics of “identity”, “labour” and “subject formation” come into relation. Of particular interest is how the historical significance of Black Consciousness in art making worlds of liberation culture in the anti-apartheid movement (dis)connects with Neoliberalism as a technology that shapes unprecedented financial and affective powers today. Walters asks what can we identify or recognise – and what are the implications – of complex, slippery, and tense, relations between the “envisioned self” in Black Consciousness and the “homo-economicus” subject in the arts and cultural industries under neoliberalism.