Cultural Industries and Cultural Policy in Postcolonial Contexts

This chapter problematizes how postcolonial Africa understands the role of its cultural industries and cultural policy against the backdrop of contestations between processes of commodification, marketization, corporatization, and cultural decolonization in the continent. Borrowing from scholars in the fields of critical political economy and critical policy studies, the chapter discusses a long history of the competing regimes of knowledge and power in the evolution of the definitions and understandings of cultural industries and cultural policy largely shaped by social contexts and histories of the West. It stresses that definitions and understandings of cultural industries and cultural policy are not neutral or value-free, but socially and historically contingent. As such, postcolonial Africa must pay fidelity to the dictates of its imperial and (neo)colonial historical experiences in developing strategic counterhegemonic policies that protect the well-being of African cultural citizenship. In the context of colonial difference and postcoloniality, the moral summons for cultural decolonization constitute sufficiently persuasive reasons for Africa to rethink the role of its cultural policy and cultural industries since both have implications for the recovery of the continent's transformative agency.