Walters, Lee Tracy2025-09-032025-09-032025https://hdl.handle.net/10566/20827This dissertation is concerned with historical, structural, psychosocial and affective dynamics in South Africa’s art and culture worlds. The study focuses on how South Africa’s transition from apartheid to post-apartheid affected cultural workers and brought about the remaking of an arts sphere founded on liberation culture into a so-called ‘sector’ – a distinctive branch of the nation’s economy increasingly dominated by free-market neoliberal sensibilities. Attention is paid to the how those involved in cultural activities and culture itself were defined within the context of national and international struggles about and around cultural labour. The moment of transition to post-apartheid in the mid-1990s inaugurated forms of subject constitution, cultural and aesthetic production, organisation and policy-making that both influence and reflect power relations today. As the study shows, however, current patterns within the arts and culture environment were anticipated by apartheid-era struggles within and about culture and cultural work, which were not solely South African but were also shaped by global trends. Neoliberalism’s affective impact in what became a democratic arts and culture “sector” is explored in relation to: the world and labour of “cultural workers” from the 1980s to the early 1990s; the turn to entrepreneurialism in the new century; and, how cultural workers today navigate a world dominated by commodified aesthetic projects and agendas. The present study is interdisciplinary, engaging discourses and theoretical propositions from Cultural Studies, as well as the critical social sciences and humanities. Postcolonial, feminist and historical materialist theories are foregrounded with the aim of unearthing and illustrating how complex transnational, classed, racialised and gendered subject positions and struggles take on specific textures and shapes in a country that is grappling with the residual effects of apartheid. This mix brings diverse perspectives and understandings to the fore.enCultural workCultural industryLabourArts sectorSouth AfricaThesis