Subverting Value Chains Through Liberatory Cultural Production
Cultural De-commodification: Subverting Value Chains Through Liberatory Cultural Production Luam Kidane Department of Art History and Communication Studies McGill University, Montreal April, 2016 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts © Luam Kidane, 2016 1 2 Abstract Freedom is a perpetual process, which can neither be defined nor predetermined. Any attempt at freedom is therefore an improvisation, an experimentation. Cultural production can act as a site for this improvisation to take root: a viaduct from which experimentations in colour, sound, form, movement and letters allows for dialogue and explorations of liberation practices. Liberatory cultural production is a process through which interventions, provocations, modifications, and proposals are made for the purposes of expressing, understanding, shaping, and interrogating political, cultural and social frameworks. This includes music, writing, movement, language, visual art, performance, as well as other forms of expression meant to inform and create how we relate to culture. These sites of cultural production which improvise freedom challenge the commodification of cultural production because they force a conceptualization of value outside of money, utility, exchange and labour. This thesis interrogates the relationship between value, liberation and cultural production through Marxist theory, Black Radical Thought, and a case study of Senegalese hip-hop from 1980-2012 in order to assert that cultural production which is a site for the improvisation of freedom has a liberatory value which subverts the law of value at the heart of the capitalist economy. 3 Résumé La liberté est un processus perpetuel qui ne peut ni être définie ou prédéterminée.
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