The work of hope: Spiritualizing,hustling and waiting in the creative industries in Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines the dynamics of hope in creative industries in the city of Accra in Ghana. Building on theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have mobilized the concept of hope as an analytical category, we examine the economic actions and entrepreneurial behaviour of creative entrepreneurs working in “precarious geographies”, i.e. locations where precarity is not a deviation from the norm but a constant and longstanding feature. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we contend that in conditions of radical and pervasive precarity, hope represents a distinct form of work in which the potentialities of the moment extend the present into the future, while the future, however hazy and unimaginable, affects the economic vitality of the present. By unpacking three dominant practices of hopeful orientation to futurity enacted by creative workers in Accra, namely hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing, we demonstrate the usefulness of hope as a concept in analysing economic action and labour dynamics.

Keywords

Creative industries creative work creative entrepreneurship Ghana hope

Introduction

Ever since the concept of precarity emerged from the political struggles within the European labour movements in the mid-twentieth century, it has been used by social scientists to describe the experiences of labour arising from the loss of ‘good work’ as contingent on the systemic erosion of job security, labour protection and welfare provision in the global North (Standing, 2014; Waite, 2009). Although all work in neoliberal capitalism undergoes processes of flexibilisation and casualization (Standing, 2014), it is work in the creative industries that has been most consistently defined as a model of precarious work, consisting of flexible, casualized, and underpaid jobs (Gill and Pratt, 2008; Neilson and Rossiter, 2008), executed by individualizing, self-enterprising subjectivities that internalize, affectively and bodily, the insidious effects of work precarization (Gill and Pratt, 2008; McRobbie, 2016). Creative workers tend to voluntarily accept in the present, unpaid, underpaid and short-term jobs while enduring affective distress, burnout, depression and anxiety in the hopes of securing a stable and well-paid self-expressive job and ‘the good life’ in the future (Duffy, 2017; Ross, 2000).

Creative labour studies typically focus on creative workers’ orientation to futurity understood as an aspirational (Duffy, 2017), calculated (Neff, 2012) goal-centred endeavour, all of which ensnares creative workers into self-discipline and self-exploitation on the promise of the deferred attainment of glory, fame and fortune. By positing a nostalgic return to a lost golden age of ‘good work’ with stable and long-term employment, these scholars contend that a continued attachment to a gamut of unrealizable, illusory or ‘cruel’ ‘clusters of promises’ (Berlant, 2011; Lorey, 2015; Molé, 2010) locks people in a hopeless limbo through a set of subjectifying, governing techniques (Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020).

However, the examination of precarity in the creative industries in the global North extends Eurocentric experiences of the loss of stable and well-remunerated jobs, and the aspiration for future meaningful and gainful waged work as a universal phenomenon (Alacovska and Gill, 2019). A view from the global South immediately debunks precarity as a western-centric concept. Most people in the global South have never enjoyed regular, secure, and predicable employment (Scully, 2016). In this paper, we investigate the experiences of precarity of creative workers in Accra, Ghana.

Precarity is an endemic and permanent feature of urban working lives in Accra (Stacey, 2019). After years of economic and political instability followed by decades of neo-liberal reform since the 1980s and the consequential collapse of the public sector, self-employment has become increasingly common in Ghana with more than a third of the population starting their own enterprises (Aryeetey and Kanbur, 2017; Yankson et al., 2011). Despite policy attempts at promoting formal enterprises and employment in the private sector, the vast majority of the Ghanaian population are compelled to find jobs in the informal sector, which is characterised by highly precarious forms of employment, underemployment, low and irregular earnings, and lack of social protection (Gough and Langevang, 2016). While some creative sectors such as film, music and theatre did receive governmental support in the early postcolonial years, this support—together with state-managed industrial infrastructure—has been gradually scrapped (Garritano, 2013). An extremely fragmented and cash-strapped creative sector emerged with no solid industrial infrastructures, dominated by small-scale and informal commercial enterprises (Garritano, 2013; Langevang, 2017; Shipley, 2013).

Given that precarity is a chronic feature, and not a deviation from the norm in ‘precarious geographies’ (Waite, 2009), insights from the global South should ‘provide a lesson’ to scholars trying to understand the ways in which people elsewhere cope with, get by and navigate conditions of protracted instability (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012; Scully, 2016: 163). In this article we empirically examine the dynamics of creative work in Accra, an emblematic case of ‘precarious geography’ and contribute learnings from the global South to studies of the lived experiences of precarity in creative industries (Duffy, 2017; Gill and Pratt, 2008; Kuehn and Corrigan, 2013; Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020; McRobbie, 2016). We ask: How do creative workers in precarious geographies cope with precarity? How do they orient themselves towards the future?

In so doing, we take inspiration from scholars studying precarity in the global South who treat precarity as an enduring condition of life, which has to be negotiated daily for the achievement of a liveable life (Millar, 2014; Pettit, 2019). These studies focus on everyday coping with precarity as both a form of affective wherewithal and economic sustenance. Precarious livelihoods in the global South have thus been studied through the lens of the generative possibilities of radical uncertainty and the adaptive capacities of the dispossessed, such as ‘shrewd improvisation and resourcefulness’ (Jeffrey, 2010) and ‘hustle’ (Thieme, 2018). These studies are especially important as they disentangle the analysis of precarious labour from considerations of goal-oriented futurity as attached to ‘cruel’ imaginations of a future good life (Berlant, 2011; Lorey, 2015), while reconnecting it to the hopeful ways in which everyday life is lived in ‘a precarious present’ (Millar, 2014: 49). In contrast to the precarity-induced state of paralysis in the global North (Millar, 2014), the livelihood practices of doing, making and acting in the face of a precarious present, is what Pedersen (2012) calls ‘the work of hope’.

Drawing on twenty four in-depth interviews with creative workers in Accra, we elucidate the work of hope in the Ghanaian creative industries. We examine the ‘practical dimensions of futurity’ (Alacovska, 2019: 1132), that is, how precarity is actually worked upon and worked with in everyday acts—however mundane and insignificant—that ‘fan sparks of hope’ (Anderson, 2017: 595) and from which ‘hope springs eternal’ (Guyer, 2017: 149). Studying precarious geographies necessitates ‘a method of hope’ meaning a ‘temporal reorientation of knowledge practices’ (Miyazaki, 2004) away from the paralysing effects of hopelessness to the generative potentialities of hope so as to apprehend the omnipresent ‘devotion to “life goes on”’ in spite of adverse conditions (Guyer, 2017: 148). Such a reorientation of knowledge does not imply a reification of ‘resilience’ or a romanticisation of ‘bounce-backable’ precarious subjectivities (Chandler, 2013). Rather it entails that creative work studies revise their temporal focus and concentrate on the practical, mundane and everyday realization of hope as work, since such work is always impregnated with the emergent potentialities of the future, which, however hazy and inscrutable, nonetheless affect present economic vitality. In this article, we unpack three dominant ways in which creative workers in Accra practise hope in the face of chronic precarity: hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing.

The concept of hope in the social sciences

Recently, geographers, sociologists and anthropologists have turned to the notion of hope as a generative analytic for the study of social life within geographically, politically and economically diverse empirical contexts (Anderson, 2006, 2017; Miyazaki and Swedberg, 2017). In contrast to more established analytical counterparts such as expectation and aspiration, both of which presuppose a strategic, goal-oriented, teleological and pre-mediated agency, the concept of hope has been appreciated for its semantic encompassment of the affective and virtual potentialities of the future, whose final shape and content is a ‘Not-Yet’ entity ‘marked by an enduring indeterminacy’ (Bloch, 1998: 341) but which nonetheless discloses present orientations, tendencies and intentions, however ill-defined or ambivalent. Given the ‘enduring indeterminacy’ of hope, a multiplicity of analytical conceptualizations of hope have been formulated in the past decade (Cook and Cuervo, 2019).

Utopian hope: The cruelty of hoping

Some social scientists treat hope as utopian and exuberant and therefore also as illusory and insidious. Such utopian hope has been subjected to fierce critique aimed at demystifying the principles of a ‘political economy of promises’ (Bascetta, 2016). Through this critical lens, hope implies what Berlant (1997) has influentially termed ‘cruel optimism’, denoting an unjustified enthusiasm about the prospect of future ‘good life’ and ‘good work’ that locks people in a perpetual precarious present in the name of deferred and ever-fading (empty) promises of future bounty, success and happiness. Hope, in this view, entails distinct ‘technologies of patience’ (Berlant, 1997: 222).Social scientists have keenly teased out the political consequences of the ‘cruel’ attachments to an imagined good life that result in an existential impasse in which people become ‘patiently’ complicit in their own exploitation and precarity. For example, the ‘cruel’ attachment to Hollywood-mediated neoliberal and aspirational consumer lifestyles has recently been found to perpetuate misery and anxiety across geographies, from Bosnia (Jansen, 2015) to Egypt (Pettit, 2019) by promising social mobility and ‘a better life’ to those that work hard and endure suffering. Hope is typically also considered cruel in the analysis of creative labour (Duffy, 2017; Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020; Neff, 2012) Creative industries function as ‘dream factories’ manufacturing the promise of celebrity lifestyles of glamour that attract an oversupply of ‘dreamers’ that earn their entry into the lottery of ‘becoming a star’ through prolonged hard work but low wages (Cvetkovski, 2015; Ross, 2000).

Some scholars have also argued, however, that utopian hope, however illusive it may be, need not always be passively endured. In geographical spaces permeated by rampant destitution, turbulent transitions and lax regulation, hope becomes ‘estimative’ (Webb, 2007: 74) involving a probability calculation of ‘fair gambles’ directed towards the possibilities of attainment of ‘a significant future good’. The result is typically euphoric agency compliant with the operative logic of an ‘economy of luck’ (Verdery, 1995) and a ‘get-rich-quick’ mentality (Hilson, 2010). Active engagement in utopian hope can be as devastating. Scholars have shown the corrosive impact of the fantasy of ‘fast money’ and the ever-receding fiction of rapid enrichment, linking such fantasy to participating in pyramidal financial schemes in post-socialist Romania (Verdery, 1995), pursuing ‘good fortune’ artisanal gold-digging in Ghana (Hilson, 2010) or undertaking high-risk migration (Kleist, 2016). ‘Reality talent contests’ (Cvetkovski, 2015) are one well-studied instance of active utopian hope that embodies the economy of gambles in the creative industries.

Everyday hope: Hoping as a moral project

In contrast to utopian modes of hoping, some social scientists have recently emphasised the quotidian and mundane character of hope and analysed discrete modes of hoping in everyday life (Anderson, 2006; Lindquist, 2006; Mattingly, 2010; Zigon, 2009). This scholarship affirms hope as the basic principle of life (Anderson, 2006) – as a fundamental way of being in the world (Zigon, 2009) and an ethical virtue of persevering in spite of despair, precarity and poverty (Mattingly, 2010). In these scholarly treatments of hope, the temporal horizon of hoping has been shifted from an exuberant and joyful future to a despairing and dispiriting present. The analytical focus has thus moved from faraway future utopian endeavours to the moral project of hope in the here and now.

The analytical focus on the project of hope transcends the immediate present, however, and plunges into the ‘near future’ (Guyer, 2017). The project of hope as an enactment of the ‘Not-Yet’ (Bloch, 1986) implies not only forward-looking reasoning (projection) but also hands-on action involving an array of daily practices that pursue ‘the project of hope’.

Medical sociologists have argued, meanwhile, that hope in the face of suffering and terminal illness is actively pursued and becomes ‘a moral project’ in which people struggle ‘to cultivate a practice of hope that is bearable despite its elusive promises, its retreating horizons’ (Mattingly, 2010: 5). To surrender to defeatism and give up hope represents a ‘failure to take responsible action’ (Becker, 1997: 122). Scholars investigating ‘disrupted lives’ (Becker, 1997) in the wake of environmental disasters, emergencies or cultural devastation, argue that in ‘dark times’ filled with despair (Solnit, 2016) ‘radical hope’ arises, implying a capacity ‘to see a genuine, positive, and honorable way of going forward’ and to enact attachments to radically different sets of potentialities (Lear, 2008: 93). Extending Lear’s ideas, Miyazaki and Swedberg (2017) have influentially argued that hope requires ‘a temporal re-orientation’ of knowledge that mobilizes the future—the emerging uncertainty and virtuality of the not-yet—as a blueprint for action in the present. Hope in this view is always folded into the actual (Anderson, 2006). Temporal re-adjustments of epistemological horizons require practical agency and everyday hopeful engagement with present hardships and adversities to re-enact hope. Solnit (2016) shows how, in ‘intensified times’ of disaster, hope is imbued with ‘an exhilarating sense’ of the radical possibilities of finding immanent meaning in minor acts of kindness, generosity, and taking care of each other.

Other scholars have stressed how, in spaces of ‘precarious presence’ of protracted poverty and resource scarcity, people are forced to ‘live for the present’ (Lindquist, 2006). In enforced presentism, however, hope can be everyday but passive, amounting to resigned fatalism or doomed ‘timepass’ of ritualistic waiting/wasting (Jeffrey, 2010). In ‘waithood’, the expectation of progress (from youth to adulthood) is subjected to a dramatic deferral and suspension – of waiting in vain for something miraculous to happen. Conversely, everyday active hope challenges the impotence of waithood. Such active hope involves routine and quotidian projects for getting by, and a concerted effort at ‘feeling better’ (Anderson, 2006) and ‘feeling everything adds up’ (Pedersen, 2012). Active everyday hope thus constitutes a distinctive mode of work.

Hope as a mode of work

Hope is a ‘distinct form of work’ (Pedersen, 2012: 6), and practising hope emerges as a virtuous attempt, however irrational, to align the virtual potentials of a moment with future economic sustainability and existential viability. According to Lindquist (2006: 8), ‘hope is the existential aspect of agency and people craft ways for themselves to secure hope even under the direst privations’. When practising and crafting hope, people do not necessarily devise contingency plans or foresee predictable outcomes but cherish a generative set of virtualities that are imagined from a ‘pregnant’ vantage point in the future (Swedberg, 2017). In the work of hope it is the future, with its openness and elusiveness, that is mobilized as a guide to labour and economic action in the present moment (Miyazaki, 2004).

In spaces where uncertainty is pervasive, forming strategies of action as aligned to the brute reality of long-standing precarity, would necessarily lead to despair and despondency. In such circumstances, the work of hope actively re-creates the virtual potentials of a moment and a space in which ‘the magical manifestation of “profit”’ (Pedersen, 2012: 4) will be somehow actualized. The work of hope is directed towards reproducing the determination to approach the world as ‘fluid, plastic, and capable of being moulded by one’s agency’ (Webb, 2007: 76) in order to yield desired results. Such an anti-deterministic attitude (refusing to succumb to defeatism in the face of evident precarity) is what Webb calls ‘resolute hope’. Resolute hope is a mode of hoping in which strategies of economic action are not based on calculation of evidence (those strategies would be self-defeating), but on ‘acting against the evidence’ in which hope ‘takes control and creates the chances’ for achieving the good, against all odds (those strategies are thus self-efficacious) (Webb, 2007: 75 and 76, original emphasis). It is here that hope leaves the sphere of the affective and the cognitive (the psychosocial resources to keep going) and enters the domain of behaviour and practice (the resolve to re-enact the future achievement of the good, however hazy and unobtainable, in the present).

In this paper, we show how hope as a mode of work within the creative industries in Accra manifests itself both as an active and passive, utopian and everyday engagement with futurity when dealing with a precarious present. Drawing on our empirical data, we outline three modes in which hope is practised in economic life: hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing.

Research design

Contextualization of the study

Accra is home to a creative sector brimming with entrepreneurial activities. While there are no statistics available as to the size of the creative industries or the number of people employed in creative industries in Ghana, sector-specific studies show that music (Shipley, 2013), fashion (Langevang, 2017), and film (Meyer, 2015) are attracting increasing numbers of young people who set up small-scale businesses to make a living, gain public recognition and/or engage in creative change-making. Cultural production has only recently been framed in terms of ‘creative industries’ with major economic potential, and Ghanaian policymakers increasingly perceive the creative industries as key not only to cultural preservation but also to job creation and economic growth. Creative industries are thus increasingly taking a central role in Ghanaian development policies, with the government stating that they are committed to strengthening the capacity of the sector to promote economic development—with initiatives such as establishing a Creative Arts Council in 2018, drafting a new Creative Arts Bill in 2019, and supporting Ghana’s debut at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 2019. The development of creative industries dovetails with President Addo’s ‘Ghana beyond Aid’ agenda, which aims to break with decades of aid dependence and to empower local private businesses to lead the future development of the country.

This emphasis on the economic potential of creative industries in Ghana follows decades of economic restructuring that has placed increasing confidence in private sector-led growth and entrepreneurship, promoted under the notion of a ‘Golden Age of Business’ (Arthur, 2006). Like many other African countries, Ghana has undertaken a series of neo-liberal reform programs under the banner of Structural Adjustment since the 1980s. Although reform has stabilised the economy and Ghana has shown relatively high rates of economic growth of between 5 and 10 percent over the last decade, this growth has not yielded adequate jobs in the formal private sector, which remains dominated by informal self-employment. Estimates suggest that more than 80 percent of the Ghanaian population is employed in the informal economy (World Bank, 2015).

The enthusiasm surrounding creative industries in Ghana must be seen in the light of new and wider optimistic narratives about ‘Africa Rising’, which are increasingly striving to replace pessimistic images of Africa plagued by war, poverty, and disease. In this narrative, the new (future) Africa is characterised as enjoying accelerating economic growth, rising incomes, booming middle classes and a youthful population teeming with creativity and entrepreneurship (Langevang, 2017; Mahajan, 2009). However, this enthusiastic view needs to be tempered. The creative industries in Ghana are merely ‘emerging’ (Jansson, 2011), in the sense that they lack established institutions, structures, and standardised processes. Despite the increased attention paid to creative industries in policymaking, many creative businesses in Ghana are struggling due to institutional voids, including limited access to loans, subsidies and investment (De Beukelaer, 2017), inadequate industrial infrastructure, and high degrees of informal self-employment (Langevang, 2017).

Methods

This paper draws on field research carried out in Accra in 2018 in the form of in-depth semi-structured interviews carried out with 24 people running small independent businesses in the creative industries. The respondents were identified through internet searches, magazines and creative industry associations initially, and subsequently through snowballing. The interviews lasted from 45 minutes to 2 hours, were taped whenever possible and transcribed verbatim.

To diversify the sample, we included respondents from the visual arts, music, film and fashion (see Table 1). The respondents were aged between 23 and 80, with the majority in their twenties and thirties. There were 9 female and 15 male respondents, all of whom lived and practised their art in Accra. The respondents came from a wide range of socio-economic groups, which we assess through a holistic review of their life, work, and educational circumstances. A few, such as Adam, a retired professor and internationally famous painter, are members of the elite, whereas others, such as Sandra, who will be paid between 100-200 GHS ($17–35US) for 10–15 days’ work as an actress, are at the lower end of the spectrum. The majority of our respondents fit somewhere in the middle.

Table 1.

List of respondents.

Name	Age (2018)	Profession
Abeena	23	Singer
Kofi	30	Musician
Sandra	29	Actress
Leo	40	Film production manager
Elizabeth	36	Actress/film producer
Thomas	45	Sculptor
Alex	39	Painter
Adam	80	Painter
Deborah	28	Graphic designer/photographer
Valerie	32	Fashion manager
Stephen	24	Photographer/graphic designer
Frederick	36	Painter
Charles	55	Musician
Tony	36	Musician/event manager
Paula	35	Fashion designer
Robbie	31	Musician/record label owner
Miriam	25	Singer
Salomon		Actor/film producer
Roger	24	Musician
Edward	45	Painter
Beatriz	52	Painter
Kwesi	58	Painter/musician
Natasha	35	Painter
Francis	27	Painter

In our interviews, we were particularly concerned with how creatives practically managed their work and businesses and how they thought about them. How did they see the future? What did they want to achieve? What obstacles did they face? Hope then emerged as a significant existential theme during our exploratory coding in Nvivo because it articulated our participants’ ways of coping with the precarity of their work and businesses. Once the theme of hope had been identified, we reiteratively coded the data in order to tease out different meanings of hope (Langley, 1999: 699–700). For example, we read through the transcripts with various theoretical conceptualizations of hope in mind (i.e. utopian, moral, everyday) to test these concepts against our data, and in doing this the ‘everyday’ nature of their hope emerged as dominant, as opposed to, for example, grand ideas for the future that were disconnected from their present entrepreneurial activities. We then aggregated the different ways in which the respondents talked about hope and oriented themselves to the present and future into the three interrelated sub-categories: 1) hustling, 2) waiting, and 3) spiritualizing that characterize the everyday work of hope for creatives in Accra.

Hope as an existential mode of being

Across our interviews there was a pervasive sense that the situation in the creative industries in Ghana was changing and developing and that a better future was imminent. The interviewees recognized that the government was taking action (even if they did not mention specific policy interventions) and reflected optimistically on the potential of digitalization for transforming the creative industries (particularly film and music). For example, Charles (a musician and prominent figure within the Ghanaian musician’s union) referenced the innate potential of creative industries for sustainable development. In his view the exploitation of natural resources such as gold and oil will eventually be untenable, but the same cannot be said for creativity: “It is only creativity that doesn’t finish, and that’s the future.” With the right resources for the creative sector, he asked, “Can you imagine what we could do?” Our interviewees emphatically embraced the ‘Africa Rising’ narrative and its optimism for the future. Miriam, a star singer, for example, was very hopeful:

The system here is not strong – it’s not in place for so many things to happen. But I started five years ago and since I started I can see it’s changing gradually. […] I’m very hopeful […] there is light at the end of the tunnel […] it’s been growing, so I don’t see why it can’t get to that point where all the systems are in place and the musicians are very happy.

The combination of utopian narratives and contextual knowledge have created a distinctly hopeful milieu in the face of radical uncertainty/precarity. Each change taking place in and outside the creative industries in Ghana was read as a sign that a better future was about to manifest. Despite acknowledging financial hardship and economic adversity—for example, she could not earn a living in the film industry alone—actress and producer Elizabeth also said she thought that the future was “only going to get better”, while Charles (a musician, mentioned above) declared he was “very, very hopeful that things in the music industry will change for the better”.

While our interviewees frequently invoked wider economic/political shifts as causes for hope and for persevering in the face of the extreme precarity of their industries, however, they did not passively hope for the impact of these changes to come to them. Most of our informants actively practised hope—a kind of hope “not necessarily aimed at the future good, but primarily at the perseverance of a sane life” (Zigon, 2009: 258), and one that is necessary for survival. The urgency of our informants to persevere in the face of precarity allowed most of our interviewees to envision a brighter future even when their businesses were in dire straits (see Darkwah, 2013 for a similar story in the Ghanaian oil industry). They took various kinds of actions that contained a resolve to act in spite of pervasive and acute precarity (Webb, 2007). Tony, a musician and music event manager, and holder of two university degrees, was particularly forceful in expressing the need to be active and hope against all odds: “I believe we have hands and feet because we are supposed to work. I believe we have brains so we can think. Hard work truly does not break bones. We all face hard times.” Creative workers in Accra see the future as unknown and therefore filled with potentiality – a potentiality that contains a prospective momentum in which both the anticipation and resolution of economic action instantiates shared beliefs in hard work and a better life (Guyer, 2017) in distinct everyday practices of hope (Alacovska, 2019). We will now outline three practices of everyday hope: hustling, waiting, and spiritualizing.

Hustling: Making it work against all odds

Hustling is a prominent manifestation of the work of hope as an active mode of dealing with everyday uncertainty and precarity. It once referred to informal/semi-legal activities, often in ghetto life, that people on the margins chose as an alternative to the low-paid and demeaning work typically available to them (Thieme, 2018); however, the term is now used to describe the everyday entrepreneurial activities of workers in a much larger variety of contexts, including in the creative industries (Mehta, 2017; Steedman, 2017). Rather than being merely a mode of coping with precarity, hustling is a way of actively working to find beneficial outcomes in uncertain conditions. According to Thieme (2018: 538), the concept of hustle encapsulates the experiences of precarity and uncertainty “that couple struggle and hope”. Hustle refers to the “process of being caught in – but also creatively detangling oneself from – the vicissitudes of labour limbo” (Thieme, 2018: 538). Through this lens, hustling is a ‘hopeful’ strategy of getting by that mobilizes the aptitude and acumen needed to navigate states of everyday uncertainty.

To hustle is to approach one’s life in a hopeful and entrepreneurial way. Robbie embodied this ethos. He was running a music business, which he started at 17, and had grown from nothing without any formal training after senior high school. In his early career he had reinvested everything he had earned in order to buy the recording equipment he needed, and he had persevered throughout the 4–5 years of this process. “No dream is too big”, Robbie declared, and his dreams included scoring a Marvel movie and creating a commercial for the Super Bowl – dreams that demonstrate his aspiration to be among those in the top echelons of his field. His drive to achieve these dramatic goals was undimmed by the challenges he faced in running a music business in Accra. He narrated several core problems: first, the domestic touring circuit is limited; second, musicians need to have had “a hit song at least in the past six months” to book performances; third, reliable figures about market reach – such as the number of downloads per song, for example – are needed to secure backing from financial institutions, yet this sort of data still does not exist for the Ghanaian music industry; and fourth, it is difficult for Ghanaians to engage in e-commerce (PayPal, for instance, does not work in Ghana). Robbie looked past these problems into the future, however, at the landscape that would exist once the payment problem was solved, and this hope motivated him to keep hustling. His vision of the future was mobilized as a guide for his actions in the present:

The thing is Ghanaians really like music. Ghanaians are so passionate about music that if the payment systems were fixed I can guarantee you online distribution would rake in so much money in Ghana.

Robbie was hopeful because he saw the future as a space where these problems would eventually disappear. Instead of being petrified by the absence of formal industrial infrastructure, he kept hustling, taking a shot at developing the very same industrial structures absent in Accra such as organising the first Ghanaian talent show to improve the recruitment of musicians, and working closely with local magazines to increase the visibility of the industry.

Many of the creative workers we interviewed hustled to expand their audiences in order to increase their hopes of getting by. Alex, a painter, maintained a presence in two distinct art markets: he painted in acrylics for the street arts market in Accra, and expensive oils for a high-end gallery, and he signed each type of painting with a different name. He did this in order to safeguard a steady income, for while an oil painting could sell for 8,000GHS (1,400USD), sales were infrequent and unpredictable. Similarly, Abeena (a musician, studying at the university) confided that being proficient in many genres, including pop, jazz, soul and hip-hop, had resulted in more work at different venues (hotels, churches, weddings, etc.), so she accordingly hedges the risk of any single genre momentarily experiencing a decline in audiences and weakening business power. Instead of waiting passively for the ‘big gig’ and the ‘big sale’, Alex and Abeena hustled in an array of small and mundane arts activities that kept their hope of ultimate economic success alive.

A final hustling strategy was diversifying their businesses. Alex (a painter, mentioned above) and Paula, a fashion designer with degrees in both art and business management, likewise navigated uncertainty through the hopeful strategy of hustling. In their cases, hustling manifested in the form of diversifying their business portfolios with the addition of multiple micro-enterprises in order to manage risk. This strategy is common across the global South where ‘even relatively secure wage workers have long had a tendency to rely on complex livelihood strategies that combine wages with non-wage income sources’ including, for example, subsistence production, petty commodity production, and small-scale trading (Scully, 2016: 165–66). Alongside his work as a full-time visual artist, Alex had two other businesses: a poultry farm and a small bar. His poultry farm was the most lucrative of his enterprises. Alex operated these multiple businesses as a means of coping with the difficulties of being a painter in a context where an artist can go without making a sale for a year or more. He persisted in his creative business, rather than switching to the more lucrative poultry business, because his businesses were financially interrelated and co-dependent: “When the poultry comes I use the poultry money as a support. When the painting comes I use the painting money to support the other side. So sometimes I balance things.” Alex did not persist with his painting business solely on account of his passion for it; rather he stayed because he needed multiple businesses in order for any of his businesses to work. Like Alex, Paula ran both a creative business (as a fashion designer) and a non-creative business (selling fresh fish), though a vital difference between these cases is that Paula’s fashion business was longer established and more lucrative than her fish business. “In terms of earnings, clothing is high at the moment, but the fish business has potential,” she explained, so she was investing time and resources into her two-year-old fish business instead of focusing exclusively on her fashion business, since without an income stream from outside her first business she would have “nothing to push it back up” if business “goes down”. Her second business thus appeared to serve as a form of insurance for her first business. Both Paula and Alex took action in a context in which they could not risk depending solely on their creative businesses to sustain themselves. Hustling thus equalled the work of hope.

Waiting: Placing economic outcomes in abeyance

It would be misleading if this paper were to be understood as painting a picture of creative workers in Accra as always and only being active, constantly seizing the day and hustling to find opportunities for their businesses. Rather, the creative workers we interviewed engaged in a spectrum of activities, from hustling to waiting. While some forms of waiting are necessarily passive and resigned, with a degree of hopelessness that paralyses agency, this is not always the case. Waiting can be a tactic that is “strategic rather than passive” (Lombard, 2013: 817), where action is deferred in the hope of securing some future gain and as a means of preventing present reckless behaviour. According to Jeffrey (2008: 957), in the right conditions waiting does not merely imply ‘a timepass’ devoid of agency but must rather be understood as ‘an active, conscious, materialized practice in which people forge new political strategies, in which time and space often become the objects of reflection”. Similarly, Honwana (2012: 4) argues that youth stuck in the involuntary and protracted adolescence of waithood ‘are not really inactively ‘waiting’ for their situation to change’ but are rather “dynamic and using their creativity to invent new forms of being and interacting with society’.

The Ghanaian creative workers we interviewed also deployed waiting as a hopeful strategy. We can see this in the case of a high-end fashion brand managed by Valerie. The brand had entered the Nigerian market some four years ago but had “to pull out” because production issues meant they could not simultaneously supply that store and their Ghanaian flagship store. Valerie was therefore ‘waiting for the moment to get pregnant’ (Swedberg, 2017): “We had to hit the reset button on that, pull back and sort of analyse to see what is the best time to re-enter Nigeria.” An opportunity presented itself immediately after the closure of the Lagos fashion shop, but Valerie waited and did not seize that opportunity because “it wasn’t the right time to re-enter the market”. Valerie had worked in Canada, but preferred to have her business in Accra because the milieu is more precarious. In the Canadian fashion industry “everything is set in stone” whereas in Ghana “you have to actually create the industry”

In North America it’s fighting for a little bit of the pie, the huge pie is already full. Here the pie is free and it’s just up to you, just go and it can happen. It’s interesting, I actually like it.

Building the brand takes time, and Valerie faced problems when she tried to expand too rapidly, but through deploying her time and waiting carefully she hoped for major success. Leo, a film production manager, also deployed waiting as a hopeful and calculated tactic in his business. Alongside his work as a production manager he had an enterprise managing seven artists. When asked if he was happy with the income gained from this enterprise he reacted with surprise at the question because he does not collect money from the artists he manages, something he explained through the logic of waiting:

Ghana here the system is such a way that you need to get to certain stage before people recognize you and they start paying you. You can’t just wake up today and they start paying you, is not possible because nobody knows you.

His waiting was ‘strategic rather than passive’ (Lombard, 2013) and he was building his reputation while hopefully looking to the day when he could cash in on his work, as without waiting this imagined payday would never be possible. In the meantime he continued to hustle to make movies and in his third enterprise renting filmmaking equipment.

With similar perseverance, Adam, an internationally famous painter and retired professor, embarked upon the ambitious task of opening a gallery to promote Ghanaian art. Adam spent his career in the unusual position of “painting because I wanted to paint” because his university salary supported him—a rare case of a creative being involved in waged labor. In his retirement he was making use of his elite status to address a major issue facing artists in Accra: the lack of commercial galleries. He continually hustled to face significant challenges building and running his gallery, including legal troubles, securing financing or attracting a local audience for the gallery. But Adam’s orientation towards the gallery was incurably hopeful. He awaited success (e.g. a thriving customer and visitor base), and each obstacle that his gallery overcame further compounded his hope in the inevitability of future success. For him, reaching the successful future “takes time but it’s happening”. Hope is the bridge across the chasm that separates the present from the future; without it, the gulf is impossible to cross – and correspondingly to keep running the business.

Waiting and hustling are inextricably linked practices for workers in creative industries in Accra. We can see this, for example, in Sandra’s career as an actress. Acting was a passion, and though she had been in movies and TV series in the past, at the time of the interview she had not worked as an actress for a year and a half, which was “quite devastating and frustrating”. Nevertheless, her orientation towards the future was entirely optimistic:

We are hoping that this year a lot could happen, because I spoke to my production manager about a week ago, and he was quite reassuring that this year a lot of projects were going to come on, so I should just hold on and hope for the best.

This hope on Sandra’s part that her acting career would bounce back was not underpinned by specific actions but rather by her resolve to wait for the right moment to come. While she waited for her ‘moment’ to come, however, she was also ‘doing the meanwhile’ (i.e. productively filling time while waiting for a better future to arrive) by hustling. Alongside her acting, Sandra had an informal import-export business buying and selling clothing, hair extensions, and makeup. She described the business in the following way: “The profit outcome is not big but it’s better than sitting at home doing nothing.” She dreamed of one day starting her own production company, something she had not yet done because she lacked the money; but in the meantime she was working incrementally to make that dream a reality. Her ‘meantime business’ – what she did instead of ‘sitting at home doing nothing’ – would also be put to use in realizing her dreams.

Eventually my businesses are going to be an intermarried thing because my line of business will also be needed in my movie career, because I have my clothing line, I have my make-up line, and whenever I want to shoot something I won’t go out looking for a makeup artist. I won’t go out looking for a wardrobe personnel – I have everything available.

Sandra worked hard at her personal business to prepare for the day when she could merge it with her passion for acting and start her production company. She did not expect immediate success, or even to realise this dream in the medium term. “It’s going to take quite a long time and it’s going to be quite challenging,” she said, but “with determination, discipline and hardworking, I believe I will achieve that dream.” Sandra’s hope was not utopian but everyday and active; she was waiting for a better future but she was also ‘doing the meanwhile’ and hustling to make that future happen.

Waiting and hustling are modalities of hope that exist on a spectrum, and the actions of each of the creative workers we interviewed shifted between passive and active, utopian and everyday modes of hope. From our data, waiting emerges as a reflexive practice whereby economic outcomes reveal themselves as potentialities, or, as Miyazaki (2004: 86) contends, economic action is suspended or ‘placed in abeyance’. In a state of abeyance, economic actors defer action in anticipation of there being ‘a beneficent agency in the world’ able to resolve the conundrums of ‘bad and good luck’ that determine entrepreneurial success or failure (Guyer, 2017: 150). As we have shown in the cases of Valerie, Sandra, Adam, and Leo, keeping the economic outcomes of creative businesses in abeyance means recreating propitious configurations of conditions to secure, through hard work and ‘doing in the meanwhile’, the productive intervention of a ‘beneficent’ agency. When creative workers felt their ability to control the outcomes of their economic actions was severely limited, they reverted to spiritualizing.

Spiritualizing

In precarious geographies, an uncertain and ‘disabling’ business environment ‘drives/stimulates the use of religiosity in business’ (Namatovu et al., 2018: 261). As a context of creative work, Accra is ‘disabling’, and thus it is perhaps unsurprising that creative workers frequently discussed the role of God in their businesses. Roger, a musician who was financially dependent on his parents, presented the view that work and spirituality were deeply linked. The Bible may say ‘Ask and it shall be given unto you’, he said, but “when you ask and you believe that it will be given to you,” he declared, “you don’t just sit there and wait for it to be given to you – you have to work. It just boils down to hard work and having faith and perseverance”.

Praying was one of the spiritualizing modes of action performed by many interviewees. For example, Edward (a painter with 18 years of experience) said: “When I’m about to paint I pray, and when I finish I pray. When I put it in my studio, I pray to God and ask God to bring a particular customer for this particular painting.” Similarly, Elizabeth (an actress and film producer, mentioned above) stated that God has “to be part of your life” and not just your business practice: “When I wake up I pray for my kids, I pray for all my jobs, and then I put all my jobs in God’s hands.” These creative workers put their hope in God but were still taking action through the act of praying and adhering to religious injunctions. Such prayer is not simply messianic or utopian, since norms of religiosity also encourage a new ethic of perseverance and facilitate hopefulness as a moral project (see Mattingly, 2010; Zigon, 2009) in the face of economic adversity. According to Meagher (2009: 416), religiosity in African businesses displays distinct Weberian tendencies as the religion-imposed virtues of frugality, strong work ethic, and a sense of responsibility, drive economic action and help ‘producers cope with the economic depredations’.

Not only was God frequently invoked by our interviewees but so was magic. Magic is ‘one of the ways of crafting hope’ (Lindquist, 2006: 8), and it gives the everyday experience of uncertainty and precarity a renewed sense of generative possibilities for manipulating the future and exerting agency even under the most trying or hopeless of circumstances. Sorcery is a belief system that proscribes institutionalized and socially shared individualized trajectories of action amidst pervasive and deep-rooted uncertainties (Douglas, 2004). Our interviewees in Accra were acutely alert to the role of witchcraft in creative entrepreneurship. Some respondents mentioned charmed objects that could manipulate business behaviour through magic. Leo, a film production manager, for example, told us that if someone took one of your belongings they could charm it and then you would feel compelled to do something without knowing why, for instance ‘casting that person in your film’ or choosing to film in a ‘haunted house’.

Witchcraft beliefs have gained renewed force with the rise of neoliberal economies and new types of entrepreneurialism across the world (Ashforth, 2005). The neoliberal market’s future-orientation to capital acceleration and accumulation chimes well with witchcraft’s promise of control over future events (see Douglas, 2004). Contemporary active seeking to be ‘blessed by the spirits’ and of taming ‘the mystical force of good luck’ is bound to locally situated moral injunctions for appropriate conduct, daily entrepreneurialism and economic survival (Ashforth, 2005). In precarious environments, belief in witchcraft is a way of keeping hope alive, since it provides an alternative explanation for abrupt failure and protracted hardship. As such, it also furnishes the basis of action for entrepreneurial activities and can structure professional conduct (Esson, 2015; Meyer, 2015: 231). Witchcraft can be used not only to explain away misfortunes and to post-rationalize economic outcomes, such as problems in the daily management of business, but also as a guide to future-oriented economic action, such as recruitment, firing and investment decisions. Despite laughing off the idea of the efficacy of witchcraft, most of the creative workers we interviewed had taken ‘precautionary’ measures not to invoke the wrath of malicious spirits. Stephen, a photographer with a junior high school education, had painstakingly created a different online persona across a bundle of photographic enterprises so as to disassociate himself from and conceal a unique business success that might “make some people envious and predispose them to poke some envious magic”. Valerie (a fashion manager, mentioned above) emphasized that although “witchcraft is old-fashioned”, one still has to be cautious and choose one’s business partners carefully.

To neutralize the contradictions of the daily economy, both in terms of imminent failure but also success, which may induce ill-intent and envy, spiritual enterprise most commonly takes the form of anti-witchcraft practices. Jealousy and resentment are often taken as a motive for witchcraft (Ashforth, 2005: 79), so those with markers of entrepreneurial success and conspicuous consumption must take action to protect themselves and their businesses. ‘Where there is witchcraft there is usually witch-cleansing’ (Douglas, 2004: xxxiii), and several of the creative workers we interviewed in Accra were explicitly engaged in witch-cleansing to preserve hope while guarding their businesses against the malicious interventions of ‘jealous actors’ and ‘their insidious harm’ (Douglas, 2004).

Fashion designer Paula (mentioned above) explained that, in every business: “Yes you’re putting in an effort but you need the backing of God to sustain the business for you. In this environment it’s a hobby for people to go into witchcraft, especially if you make it as a fashion designer.” In addition to needing God’s ‘backing’, Paula felt she also had to take action and guard her fashion business against the influence of witchcraft – ‘the evil eye’ and the ‘envious neighbour’, requiring a combination of vigilance when hiring and prayer. She gave an example:

Even in your workshop you see certain characteristics of how people behave which isn’t okay. You employ somebody in the workshop, and suddenly everybody’s fighting, things are going missing, things are burning. You know there are always clues, they don’t come and say ‘I am a witch’, but you have to ask yourself why is this happening when this person is there? We pray about it and it goes away. Sometimes we just let the person go.

Given the inevitably eye-catching glamour immanent in the creative industries and showbusiness, many of our respondents believed creative businesses to be more prone to provoking the wrath of ‘evil rivals’. Stephen (a photographer, mentioned above), for example, reported constantly receiving friend requests on Facebook from shrines “trying to offer their anti-witchcraft services” because they knew he was running a successful creative business.

In addition to protecting their own businesses from the influence of ‘evil forces’, some of our respondents shrewdly identified entrepreneurial opportunities and established niche creative businesses to design, create and sell ‘witchcraft art’. Kwesi, a versatile artist working across visual art, music, and farming, and Edward (a painter, mentioned above) presented “devil paintings” – paintings of devils that can be used to ward off bad energy. Edward stated there was “a huge market for those painting[s]”, while Kwesi offered the following explanation of what motivates people to buy devil paintings:

They buy it because their spiritualist has told them you can only prevent that bad energy from attacking your home and family by devil painting. You ask the artist to design a devil painting for you. You don’t need it to put in your home, you can hide it under your bed. So if that painting is there, that bad energy will not come again. Because negative and negative cannot meet.

However, artists must be careful in creating these paintings. Edward had a client who wanted him to create a devil painting to hang in her bedroom. She gave him “a photograph of a highly possessed demon to paint there”, but he was unwilling to paint it because he worried “if I’m not strong spiritually by the time I have finished it the problem will rather be on my family.” Painting demons for the protection of others was a dangerous business that could not be taken lightly. Religiosity and spirituality are an integral part of making a living in creative industries in Accra, hopefully connecting prospective momentum– however irrational – with present uncertain and arduous economic action.

Conclusion

With this article we contribute learnings from the South to mainstream studies of work in the creative industries. Mainstream creative work studies draw universal conclusions from empirical evidence gathered predominantly in Euro-American creative hubs (Alacovska and Gill, 2019). Accordingly, these studies examine experiences of precarity in sole reference to the neoliberal logic of socio-economic development positioning creative workers as prototypes of individualized, self-enterprising, and self-expressive future-oriented selves (Mackenzie and McKinlay, 2020). Based on our study of creative work in precarious geographies, namely Accra, we argue that when transcending precarity becomes illusory even in the global North, creative work studies can no longer uncritically assume the disciplining power of future-orientation and must focus on the everyday hopeful ways of coping with precarity in the present (Jeffrey, 2010; Lindquist, 2006; Millar, 2014). This article suggests that when there is no viable prospect of overcoming precarity, and with an increasing number of workers entering radically uncertain labour markets, creative work scholars should analyse experiences of precarity in relation to hope as a distinct form of work – of hoping as a labour practice (Anderson, 2017; Lindquist, 2006; Pedersen, 2012).

Mobilizing theoretical insights from geography, anthropology and sociology that have engaged with the concept of hope as a productive category with which to examine economic action and entrepreneurial behaviour, we have argued for a conceptualization of hope as a mode of work and an everyday practice of coping with pervasive precarity, economic hardship and financial adversity. Drawing on a qualitative study of creative workers in Accra, we have explored the lived dynamics of hope as a mode of work and have outlined three practices of hope: hustling, waiting and spiritualizing.

The practices of hustling have long been neglected in studies on cultural and creative industries, though scholars have recently utilised this term to describe the entrepreneurial activities of establishing a filmmaking career in LA (Mehta, 2017), or working as a female film producer in Nairobi (Steedman, 2017). The role of waiting, i.e. of placing economic outcomes in abeyance, can be expected to play a vital role in the management of any creative business, especially given the radical uncertainty immanent in creative industries owing to the intrinsic impossibility of predicting future success or audience demand. However, these practices have barely been examined in the scholarship on creative industries. Likewise, the role of religiosity and spirituality in creative work has received scant attention, in spite of failure being a widespread industrial norm in the creative economy and of success having always been described as ‘radically uncertain’ and precarious (McRobbie, 2016), all of which are conditions that have elsewhere been strongly correlated with the prevalence and importance of divination and prayer in the economy (Guyer, 2017; Meagher, 2009).

Such negligence is related to the failure of mainstream studies of creative industries to engage with creative work outside of a handful of core Euro-American creative metropolises – an oversight that has hampered theoretical innovation and advancement in the field (Alacovska and Gill, 2019; De Beukelaer, 2017). Our study does not merely seek to add yet another disjointed empirical case of a less-studied geographic region, however; rather we hope our findings will contribute to ‘a theory of the South’ that is deeply entrenched in situated, ‘ex-centric’ empirical realities (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012), whose analysis intervenes in and decentres the entrenched assumptions of dominant (mainstream) research agendas in cultural and creative industry studies. As the economic, regulatory and industrial contexts in which creative businesses operate in the global North become increasingly precarious, casualized and destabilized, so scholars of creative industries cannot simply continue business as usual. Instead we urgently need a nuanced and comprehensive understanding of what people actually do once the possibility of arriving at a nirvana state of ‘post-precarity’ is clearly no longer an option. Investigation is urgently needed, therefore, into the lived dynamics of the three practices of hope outlined in this paper amongst workers in the creative industries in both the global North and global South.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

Work on this article was made possible by a grant awarded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark project no. 18-05-CBS (Advancing Creative Industries for Development in Ghana).

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