Cultural Capital and the Distribution of the Sensible

Informed by the theories of Bourdieu and Rancière on aesthetics and the role of the arts and art criticism in society, this article analyses the emergence of the South African Arts Journalism Awards (2013–2014) nearly 20 year after the end of apartheid. The particular research questions are whether the competition can be described as “transformed” in post-apartheid and post-colonial terms, and whether the winners displayed engagement or disengagement with larger socio-political debates. The competition arguably aids the distribution of “cultural capital” in the subfield of arts journalism. Following Rancière, the article also argues that the Awards provide credibility to the political views expressed by the winning arts journalists, in other words to their particular perspective on the “distribution of the sensible”. The methodology includes a brief quantitative comparative overview in search of indicators of transformation, as well as analysis of the entered content and motivational letters of six winners in both years using critical discourse analysis as method. The article found that the winners displayed a high level of political engagement, in contrast to suggestions by previous research that post-apartheid arts journalism has lost direction and purpose. But while male and female involvement in the competition was on a par (except in the list of final winners), the South African Arts Journalism Awards have clearly not been transformed in terms of “racial” and ethnic diversity.