On the margins of cultural policy: the unnaming of black women stage directors in the white paper on arts, culture and heritage

Abstract

The inaugural 1996 White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage was created around democratic ideals of inclusion, access, and equal participation of everyone in South Africa’s arts and culture landscape. Subsequent iterations of the policy have re-positioned arts and culture as a market-driven sector, prioritising arts and culture’s profitability. While this shift is understandable considering South Africa’s enduring triple challenges of unemployment, inequality, and poverty, it locates Black women practitioners specifically—as the most historically marginalised group—obscurely within contemporary theatre directing. That the phrase “Black women” is absent across all White Paper versions demonstrates a lack of intersectional awareness. This paper analyses findings from a study about Black women directors across three of South Africa’s five state-funded theatres, namely Playhouse (Durban), Artscape (Cape Town), and Market Theatre (Johannesburg), over 20 years (1999–2018). While findings indicated that Black women (inclusive of African, Coloured, and Indian) consistently comprised the least number of directors that accessed these theatres over the period, this paper focuses on cultural policy. A content analysis of the White Paper, specifically the initial 1996 version, the first revision of 2013 and the effective policy of October 2017, found that the language used in these policies lacks an intersectional understanding of the extent of Black women’s historical marginalisation across all spheres of life. While cultural policy is not the sole reason for the under-representation of Black women stage directors at state-funded theatres, this analysis presents an evidence base to understanding how government policies can be enabling or exclusionary. A cultural policy framework that neglects to expressly include Black women as an identifiable category and does not include an intersectional analysis of their experiences, relegates this group of practitioners to the margins of an arts and culture landscape in a democracy.