“I don’t want my parents to know I do video clips”: Managing familial relations to pursue creative work in Accra,Ghana

Abstract

This paper examines how creative workers in Accra's popular music and music video sector manage familial relations to pursue creative work. Generally, due to the precariousness of creative work and negative attitudes toward popular arts, pursuing creative work can become a source of intense family conflict because it often deviates from familial expectations. I explore how managing familial relations is an important coping strategy creative workers use to deal with pervasive precarity. Specifically, I argue that creative workers draw on three main relational practices: Negotiating a compromise to pursue creative work, masking their creative work, and defying familial expectations. These relational practices are interrelated and complement each other. Situated within production studies from the South, this study demonstrates the utility of using relational work to highlight how managing familial connections fundamentally shapes creative participation in spaces of pervasive precarity in the Global South.