Decolonising the Creative and Cultural Industries

This chapter argues that the twenty-first-century creative and cultural industries (CCIs) are constituted by a structural paradox: They present themselves as engines of inclusion, innovation, and cultural renewal while remaining materially tethered to coloniality and its contemporary articulation through platform capitalism. Drawing on decolonial theory and political-economy analyses of the creative economy, the chapter shows how Eurocentric standards, extractive market logics and epistemic dominance continue to organise value, visibility, and legitimacy across sectors. Three case studies illustrate these dynamics. First, Bulawayo’s contested urban heritage evidences the endurance of colonial spatial orders and the limits of symbolic reforms such as street renaming absent deeper redress, especially given unresolved state violence and donor-dependent cultural infrastructures. Second, the Carolina Herrera Resort 2020 controversy exemplifies the fashion industry’s patterned appropriation of Indigenous Mexican designs as decontextualised ‘raw cultural material’, revealing both economic extraction and epistemic erasure. Third, YouTube’s crime-infotainment ecosystem around hip-hop and trap music demonstrates how engagement-optimised recommendation and permissive ‘documentary’ carve-outs enable monetised packaging of racialised violence while communities bear social and legal risk. The chapter contends that diversity-oriented representation unaccompanied by changes to ownership, governance, data control, and revenue sharing risks becoming a metaphor for decolonisation. It concludes by outlining decolonial strategies that confront neoliberal common sense – that is, accountable monetisation governance, redistributive models that route revenues to affected communities, consent-based co-ownership, discovery boosts for community-led producers, collective cultural-rights frameworks, and investment in community-owned cultural infrastructures. Without structural interventions of this kind, the CCIs will expand while reproducing coloniality under a progressive veneer.