antonio c. cuyler, "Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector" (Routledge, 2025)
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Welcome to the new Books Network.

Welcome to New Books and Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode, I'm talking to Antonio C. Kyler about achieving creative justice in the US creative sector. So welcome to the podcast. Thank you.

This is a fantastic book, which speaks immediately to a kind of global crisis, I suppose, that we find ourselves in right across the arts, cultural and creative sectors. It uses or it's focused on

for many of its examples and case studies. But I think the broad points it makes are really kind of global and really do speak to a broad audience. In that context,

sort of set of circumstances that thinking about the kind of crisis moment maybe um you could reflect a little on why you've written the book and and i guess kind of like why now uh especially um when creative justice seems to be something that is quite far away from where um

US creative policy might be? Oh, that's such a great question, Dave. You know, it's interesting how when we academics and scholars sign contracts for books, how we like think we're going to be able to manage producing the book.

and how life gets in the way. But, and, you know, and reflecting, it actually is perfect timing. I could not have planned it better. And it literally kind of came out of my practice of consulting with cultural organizations. Because five years ago, as you know, we all globally witnessed Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd while we were locked

And so that particular inflection point for me personally compelled me to try to move towards consulting and supporting cultural organizations and doing something different and transforming internally, but also externally in terms of their relational ethics with their communities.

And so this book was an opportunity to try to crystallize some of the thinking and doing that I have been working on and consulting over the last five years, kind of autoethnographically thinking about, you know, what actually has happened as a result of, you know, this kind of big thing happening where this man literally who happened to be black had his life taken away from him and he

asking the creative sector to think differently, to do differently. And so it's fascinating to me also on a spiritual level that at the time that this happened, we had a particular person in office leading the United States. And now five years later, we are right back at that same place.

And from a spiritual standpoint, I wonder what the multiverse is asking us, particularly in the U.S., but also abroad. What is it that we need to learn? What is it that humanity needs right now to keep moving forward or else there will be consequences? And so those were some of the compelling reasons why I thought now and, you know, how the book came to be. I'm interested in that.

You mentioned that kind of sense of autoethnographic practice informing some of the examples in the book, but actually how you've, I guess, kind of synthesized that with some changes in the kind of broader theoretical context.

field of cultural policy. And part of that, I guess, is kind of, is about you and really kind of who you are. And one of the things you do early on in the book is you talk about your, your kind of positionality and you flagged, you know, your kind of applied practice with arts organizations. But I guess, yeah,

there is a an element of the book that is highly personal and i'm intrigued as to where the book kind of relates to you and why your positionality is important um it's so important because you know i i don't actually believe in objectivity i i just i don't um think that humans are by nature objective and as an example i think about the u.s supreme court

Right now, where there is a six to three majority in favor of conservatives and they will argue to their red in the face that they are highly objective, but they are not.

And so I wonder if we could be more honest about our subjectivities and just embrace them because, you know, and I do associate objectivity or the pursuit of it or the belief that it's even possible with this white supremacist culture that says that, you know, we value objectivity. So we value, you know, reasoning and logic over affect emotions and feelings, right?

which actually are the things that arguably makes us human.

And so really kind of embracing and adorning the reality that I live as a result of my subjective experience and how I've made sense of that experience was really important. But also the multitude of identities that I carry, right? Those that are privileged and those that are not privileged because the irrationality of the matrix of caste, as I call it in the book, that

That I have been subjected to as a person that is embodied and lived, right? You know, no one can tell me about the experience I have had personally with the system. I realize if I were to go through my life transacting based on my status as a cisgender man who is highly educated and.

who speaks English well enough, right? And who's also middle class, upper middle class, depending on, you know, if they're terrorists or not. I would live a certain kind of life, even in a black body, right? But that would require me ignoring the fact that I'm black, right?

I'm same gender loving. I have disabilities. Politically, I am an independent. I have been an independent since I was 18 years old. I was never a Democrat. I was never a Republican. I was always skeptical of the political system here in the United States.

And I'm also a believer, but I'm not a Christian. Right. And so that means all of these identities that I carry with me, there is a particularly a way that my life is curated and I'm constantly making sense of it myself.

And as I'm doing so, I'm, you know, I'm having some wins and I'm having some losses, right? Because the system wants me to operate in a certain kind of way as a tokenized person who could be used to further particular agendas, right?

And so that's why I insist on the independent political identity that I've always had since I was 18 and able to vote. I remember my grandmother and had an interesting conversation about that because when I turned 18, she summoned me to her house and, and she said, so here's your birthday today. And I said, yes, ma'am. And she says, you're 18. And you, did you register to vote? And I said, yes, I did. And she goes, well, what did you register as? Which I thought was pretty, you know, uh,

You know, like you're literally like it was a private decision that you're asking me to disclose this. And I said, well, I'm an independent. And she said, well, I just want to tell you, if you vote Republican, they're not going to do anything for you.

I have to say she wasn't wrong. And so absolutely the subjectivities and the ability to weave in this like personal experience of being in the fire of the work with these cultural organizations who aspire to do something different, who aspire to try to lean more towards humanity. I thought it was a fascinating tale to share with people who might be interested. I mean, another element of that,

subjectivity is as you've mentioned your work with creative organizations and I guess in the context of thinking about maybe social justice broadly why concentrate on the creative sector what is it about the creative sector that has this I guess kind of potential but also this need for the kind of work you've been doing because arts and culture has this transformative power

And this ability to descramble all of the defenses we build up to protect ourselves as humans from vulnerabilities. And a song, a dance, a story, even food and film, like have a way of descrambling all of those defense systems and getting into those places that are vulnerable to humanity.

And from a social justice standpoint, every human has a right to have access to that. And there are implications for humanity when only certain groups of people get to share their stories or certain groups of people, you know, have access to arts and culture. And in my view, the least among us, those who've been cast as the least among us,

if no one else should prioritize and getting access to arts and culture, because there's something there that I think brings out who they really are, the truth of who they are. And, and I, I do want to say we are all deserving. We're all worthy of love. We're all deserving and worthy of the love that we can find in ourselves, that arts and culture helps to aid. And, and so that's where,

I believe, you know, I, my dad was a pastor, my mom's an evangelist. You know, I was raised with this kind of like Christian value that, that really pushes us towards a love for humanity. And even when you want to like, you know, there are some people you just, you just cannot just deal with.

there is a, you know, a way that I was raised to practice Christianity, even though I don't identify as a Christian today. But I do hold on to this particular value that a love for human, human beings, but a love for all life, right. And then being able to see the oneness between me and a tree or a bug or, or, you know, any living sentient, sentient being. And so,

But as it relates to creative justice, it is an intentional seeking and advocating for the manifestation of those cast as the least among us living creative and expressive lives on their own terms. I guess part of that.

sense of justice builds on something that might be familiar with people running, familiar to people running arts organizations, which is the idea of access, diversity, equity, and inclusion, ADI. Now, obviously this is, I was going to say controversial in the US, but it isn't. It's, you know, been made controversial by,

a particular political movement um you know most of the principles um shouldn't be controversial really um but one of the things the book does is to try and say you know we can go from perhaps this sort of overly corporate practice to a broader idea of creative justice and it'd be great i think to to hear about that kind of sense of moving from organizational practice of

ADI into something like creative justice what's I suppose the kind of the idea the theory there

Yeah, the theory is that if we were to manage access, diversity, equity and inclusion or ADI, as I call the acronym with a sense of care, we could systematically change the system to have these outcomes of creative justice across society.

multiple identities and across multiple positionalities that comprise the system that is the nonprofit cultural industrial complex in the United States.

And it starts with access, which I define as removal of all barriers to participation, because that's where it starts. Right. You know, for a long time, you can take, you know, any historically and continuously low caste group in U.S. society and study the histories and the ways in which they did not have access.

It can be, you know, people of the global majority in the U.S. or people with disabilities or LGBTQ people, women, poor people, right? Any old people and young people. And so, first of all, you know, and I like to think about it as going into a building.

Is the door open, first of all, and can people walk in or is there an elevator to help them get to the top if they need it because they have, you know, a disability, a physical disability? And if access is open and working and operationalized to its fullest extent, it naturally enables diversity because humans are diverse.

We do not have the same fingerprints. And perhaps that is by design, right? You know, the creator maybe did that by design. And so if you get into a room and you realize that it's not diverse, then

then you realize, oh, we need to go back to access and open more doors and remove more barriers because somebody is not getting in who needs to be in the room and who should be in the room. And if we don't have them in the room, we will suffer deficits in our ability to move things forward the way that we need to.

And then if access and diversity are operationalized to its fullest extent, then we get to equity, right? Because people need different things because of their histories, because of the ways that they've been historically and continuously marginalized, oppressed, subjugated, discriminated against. And so we get access to the things that they need to thrive and be successful in this space, right?

And then finally, inclusion, the final step is belonging, right? Like once they're in the space, are they able to experience psychological safety? Are they able to express their ideas freely? Are they sought out for their ideas?

Now, what the right, I believe, or the Republicans or whomever they are. Right. Because I also have been trying to figure out how to move away from this us versus them language, but also speak very honestly about the fact that there is a cultural war. There is a battle. And there are some people who just are anti-human, anti-social, and they just have given up on humanity.

And then there are those of us like myself who are pro-social, who are pro-human, and who still believe that humanity, we haven't even been able to fully mine humanity's greatness because of the ridiculousness and the insidiousness of things like caste and the discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and subjugation that it produces.

Right. And so we haven't really a lot humanity's full potential and power because all humans haven't been able to flourish easily. And so instead of trying something different where we we lift people up, we encourage them. And even I was thinking about this, like I do some of my greatest thinking, Dave, on the treadmill.

I don't mean this to sound crass, but, you know, I think about the fact that we do all of this work to come here, right? Like we literally beat out millions of sperm to fertilize the egg.

And to come into this being and this existence that constantly tells us we're undeserving and we're unworthy of love, we're undeserving and unworthy of flourishing. Why not the opposite? What if we told people they were deserving and worthy of love and deserving and worthy of thriving and flourishing? And we're going to build policies that make sure that that happens.

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I mean, how can organizations do that? One of the things that comes sort of in the middle of the book is you discuss there are ways for organizations to kind of assess the extent to which they're taking those steps from access through to inclusion and thus to kind of build creative justice. But also you've got lots and lots of practical kind of case studies. So maybe we'll do those two things together.

So first of all, are there, you know, sort of like tips or prompts or suggestions that organizations can be doing to be reflecting on their practice and then to be kind of delivering on that goal of creative justice? Yeah.

Absolutely. And I try to not make the assessment overly complicated and overly quantitative, because what's most important is supporting people in their thinking about how to do it. Right. And and again, I should say that.

This is a way. This is not the way. This is essentially what I have been doing over the last five years with different cultural organizations across the creative sector. And I thought, hmm, why don't I try to synthesize some of these high points and offer them up as possibilities for exploration?

Now, also keeping in mind that the current administration is trying to still constrain diversity, equity and inclusion, or as I call it, access, diversity, equity and inclusion, and particularly in the creative sector. And so one of the things that they have cast, and I want to give this credit. So I think the conservatives and the Republicans aspire to,

to lead us into a race neutral society, right? I want to pull that out as a possible aim for their approach. Now,

One of the things that compromises that goal, if that is truly a goal of theirs, is that the New York Times last year in January published an expose on some of the conservative activists' conversations around what they were literally trying to do. So they wanted to demonize DEI. Actually, most U.S. citizens support DEI, so much so that Target,

Who pulled back on their DEI? Walmart. Who pulled back on their DEI? The corporations that pulled back on their DEI, they are experiencing some financial challenges right now as a result of it. And those who continue with their DEI practices are not. Costco is still thriving.

And so, you know, when you hear these things, you have to say, OK, well, why did these for profit corporations say, no, we're going to decline to throw away our DEI practices? We're going to keep doing it. What do they know that those who decided to bend the knee and to like anticipatory comply don't know? And I think what it is that they don't know is that actually in a capitalist society,

It is anti-capitalist to practice something other than DEI. It is anti-capitalist to exclude people because in a capitalist society, if you're truly a capitalist, you want to make as much money as is possible from anybody. You don't care who the person is. But if you and think about it again.

Women, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, people of the global majority, they all have capital to spend. Even poor people have capital. They might not have as much as other people that they can direct in a particular kind of way as a vote for or against you. And if you exclude them, why in the world would they want to support you?

And so there is this like economic rationale. And Gary Beck, he wrote a book in the 70s called The Economics of Discrimination. And he literally says, you know, the people who discriminate are they're hurting the people that they're discriminating against, but they're also hurting themselves. So it's that boomerang effect that they have to think about. But it reminds us that.

we as humans, we are interdependent on each other. We need each other. And capitalism certainly needs, you know, to, to like not operate on exclusionary practices for it to thrive. And so I wanted to like get cultural organizations thinking about that. And especially when you, you know, if you're trying to sell tickets to concerts or recitals or up your visitorship at

at the museum, you cannot be practicing these elite kinds of exclusionary practices and expect for your community to show up for you, especially now when literally every possible source of revenue for a nonprofit cultural organization is under threat by this administration.

And what is the community going to do if you're one of those cultural organizations who's been doing these things like adding convenience fees to your ticket prices and all of these hidden fees that people you're asking people to pay when they've already highly subsidized their ticket?

You're not actually going to be building great relationships with your community. And here's another thing, Dave. So we had the Great Recession here in 2009, 2010. It was, you know, I think on the latter end of 2010, early 2011, before we saw economic return. The cultural organizations that did not have good relationships with their communities are no longer among us.

And this crisis that we're living through right now is going to be the same kind of, I like to call it cultural Darwinism mechanism, that the cultural organizations who figure out how to build strong relationships with their communities by enabling creative justice are the ones who are going to survive and thrive. Those who do not, they will not be among us when this is all said and done. I mean, that's a powerful statement.

um, argument, um, for creative justice, but at the same time, the book has got, um, I guess some, some case studies of not just where it's worked, but, um, I think where organizations have kind of confronted the kind of messy reality, um, of delivering on, on their aims. And you've got things like, uh, museums, organizations, um,

choral organizations opera companies orchestras whole range of different creative case studies and i wonder if you'd like to pick a couple to give examples of on the one hand how this agenda can be realized achieved and you know how powerful it can be but also i guess how it doesn't entirely run smoothly as well yeah it is so humans are complex messy and nuanced that's one thing that

I've learned from working deeply with these cultural organizations and this work is no less complex, messy and nuanced and it's not a silver bullet so it's not perfect and

And I, you know, try to do in the last chapter, offer up, you know, some food for thought in terms of critiques of the practices and how they might be improved. But we have made significant progress. And so one of the things that I tried to do is also highlight the trade associations that

that support all museums or all orchestras or all opera companies or all theater companies in the U.S. as examples because of the way that the hierarchy is structured in the U.S. creative sector. There is a mid-ground...

group of cultural organizations that serve as like trade associations for all of the other non-profit cultural organizations and the cultural organizations tend to have membership in these associations and they um have annual conferences so like next week i'll be speaking with choruses at chorus america and the week after that i'll be speaking with the league of american orchestras and so um

And I serve on the board of Opera America. And so that's kind of how, you know, I've gotten to see all of these things. And so for the American Alliance of Museums, one of the things that I think was really, really important that they did that I want to hold up as a practice, but also, you know, am aware of.

that there is contention about it right now because of the current administration. But they have an accreditation process for museums, and I think there's something like 35,000 museums that are members of this association. And the accreditation process previous to 2020 did not require or have any kind of standard around diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. They call it a museum's.

Um, and so I wrote a article, um, in the international journal of the inclusive museum where advocated for adding it. And they did. And I, and I don't know if anyone read my article, but I kind of thought like, man, like, you know, it's great to be in alignment. And so in 2022, they literally added a new standard, um, for accreditation, um,

To, you know, for the museums to get accreditation to like include diversity, equity and inclusion and accessibility. And you wonder why wasn't that always the case? But at the same time, you express gratitude for them moving in that direction. Because my question is, without that, how were museums sure, absolutely sure that they were serving their communities?

And then for Chorus America, you know, I work with them around their strategic plan for the entire organization. And it was a three-year strategic plan.

And one of the things that I love about choruses is that there's kind of this, you know, collectivist mentality that like, it reminds me of being like watching the band kids in high school. Cause I was a chorus kid and, you know, you had your community and people supported you. People fought for you, right? Like I remember in high school, I went to a performing arts high school and there was this one football player who,

who, you know, I just seemed to annoy because his girlfriend and I were really good friends. And of course, I wasn't interested in his girlfriend because we were friends. But there was a point where the chorus kids were like, they had my back and they were like, we're not going to let you like, you know, fight this guy, fight him because he's one of us. And choruses, you think about it. I remember also

When I lived in Tallahassee, Florida, the local arts council was under threat by these politicians and the politicians were threatening to take away their funding process for disseminating cultural funding for the city. And every last chorus member sent each of the city council people an email. And this is a chorus of over 200 people, right? Right.

And they jammed up their email telling them not to do that and the power. And also research shows that chorus people participate in choruses are more civically engaged and they give more. And so already choruses have kind of like optimize and maximize knowing this about themselves. And so the idea of access, diversity, equity and inclusion and the aspiration for those practices to lead to creative justice is already embedded there.

Um, my work with opera America serving on the board and, um, has also been pretty compelling because, um, I'm seeing the development of affinity groups where before there wasn't an affinity group for people who wanted to support racial justice in opera or, you know, women, um,

and non-binary and trans identifying folks. And I've been advocating for an affinity group for people with disabilities who show up in opera because, you know, they also have something to add to, you know, the conversation about how we make opera and how we make opera

that is inclusive and considerate of multiple perspectives. And so there is great work that I've witnessed personally across the last five years. The League of American Orchestras after George Floyd was murdered, they wrote this wonderful letter. And I used to tell my clients, you know, don't make a public statement if you cannot back it up. And if you're not willing to receive criticism from the public about your statement,

But when I saw the League of American Orchestra's anti-racism statement and how they took responsibility for the ways in which they enabled racism and racist practices throughout their history, it was very emotional for me. It was very compelling because it is the closest thing that we've gotten to an apology for

And they even said something like there are countless numbers of black musicians who had their careers literally short circuited or constrained by these practices and these behaviors. And so they own responsibility for it and they have actively sought to like change it and do things differently, but also legally. Right.

I mean, that's such a brilliant range of both creative organizations, but also I think kind of changing practices and showing how organizations from start, you know, from different positions with in some ways kind of different agendas, different stakeholders, different communities, but with that kind of share day around creative justice. And, you know, we touched on quite a few things about, I guess, the kind of

the future of the sector and perhaps the future of society more, more kind of generally in this context. But,

To conclude, I'm intrigued to know about your own kind of work, that range of work with organizations that's come together in this book. I think I can foresee a great set of applications that are really just applying the book's insights in practice. But at the same time, academics also have a

a kind of restlessness for the next research project the next research question um so what are you doing in terms of kind of future work and future thinking yeah um so now that this is done um and it's out there percolating um i want to pivot hard to uh anti-racism arts health and wellness um

And I also, so for example, but I'm also interested in like audience experiences of arts that is new. And I'll give you a good example of that. So I noticed post George Floyd's murder that audiences at operas are, are booing,

um, not performances or performers, but the embodiment that certain artists, uh, portray on the stage. For example, in 2023, I went and saw this, uh, production of, of, um, Madame Butterfly by Puccini and, um, the character who sings Pinkerton, he's, you know, um,

He's a part of the U.S. military. He goes and he marries this young Japanese woman. She's 15 or 14 years old. He gets her pregnant. He leaves her and she spends...

This time, like waiting for him to return, she has a child by him and then he returns and he wants to take the child away. He and his new wife who happens to be American. Right. So when the man who sang that role came out for his curtain call, the audience booed him.

Not because of his performance, but because of what he represented. Another time, last year, I was at the Lyric Opera of Chicago serving as scholar in residence, and I went to a matinee performance of Beethoven's Olli Opera, Fidelio. There's a character in the opera, Don Pizzaro, who abuses and misuses his power to imprison his political opponents. When that man came out to take his curtain call, the audience booed him.

uh, two weeks ago, I went to see the, um, premiere of Loving versus Virginia. Uh, they're in the opera. The law is represented by these characters who kind of play the Supreme court. And there's a kind of like a, uh, um, uh, a person, a character who looks like Antonin Scalia, formerly former Supreme court justice. When those characters came out, uh,

The audience booed them. And then most recently, I went to Detroit Opera's production of Central Park Five, which includes a character who plays Tromp because Tromp

you know, inserted himself in a political conversation in 1989, calling for the death penalty for these kids who were not guilty. And he still has not apologized for, you know, what he did. But then the DA, who was, you know, this Jewish woman who, again, pinned this crime on these kids that didn't do it. And when they came out for their curtain calls, the audience booed.

So I want to know what exactly are the audiences booing, but I also want to know by talking to the artists, what does it mean for them to know that the characters they portrayed were booed, that they sang and played their roles so well that the audience got it?

And so taking that, I am currently working on a commission of an opera about Confederate monuments. And I want to study the role of opera in racial truth, healing and transformation.

But I want to also bring this opera into life because I want to have multiple conversations across multiple communities about the role of Confederate monuments in a multicultural pluralist society. And so those are just a few of the projects that are on the horizon for me. I'm also interested in studying because, again, you know, we just celebrated the first

five-year anniversary of, you know, remembering George Floyd's murder, policing hasn't changed in the U.S. There's some things that have changed, but, like, there hasn't been the transformative change that would mean that people would stop getting killed by the police because last year, 1,226 people, according to the New York Times, was killed by the police.

So, and, and disproportionately they were mostly black. And so there's an opera called blue about anti-black police brutality. And I wonder like what effects or what impacts would seeing that opera have on law enforcement where policies are moving too slow or not at all, or in the case of the current administration, they're pulling back, um,

you know, a policy shifts and changes that happen because again, this current administration is operating on the politics of cruelty. Um,

And they just don't care, right? Like if, you know, if white people were being murdered at the same rate as black people by police, then they would care. But they just don't. And the system is designed that way. And so I wonder, like, could opera get into those spaces that defenses have been built up by law enforcement to compel new relational ethics with the black community? And so these are just a few of the things that I'm thinking about and trying to make happen.