Professor antonio c. cuyler has authored a new book, Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector, which was published by Routledge in May 2025. At SMTD, cuyler is professor of music in the Department of Entrepreneurship & Leadership and a faculty associate in the Department of Voice & Opera; he also serves as a faculty associate at U-M’s African Studies Center.
Routledge offers this description of cuyler’s book:
Caste and the discrimination, exclusion, marginalization, othering, oppression, subalterning, and subjugation that it produces continue to challenge creative industries compromising culture’s verisimilitude as a public good. Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector explores the relationships between access, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI), and creative justice in the U.S. creative sector as a solution to meaningfully address enduring creative injustices.
Whether it’s the #BlackLivesMatter, #LandBack, or #MeToo movements, caste remains structurally and systemically built into U.S. Society, and thereby the creative sector. Acknowledging this realization after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 has galvanized a quest for solutions. This book encourages sincere consideration for the human toll of insisting on artistic excellence and artistic merit at the expense of profound and unnecessary identity-based human suffering.
Providing a practical guide on how to activate ADEI to achieve creative justice and a research agenda, this book is an essential reading for practitioners and scholars who feel compelled to address creative injustices that constrain the creative flourishing of historically and continuously low-casted peoples throughout the entire cultural ecosystem that defines the U.S. creative sector.
Achieving Creative Justice in the U.S. Creative Sector is available in hardcover and in an open access digital version.