Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater by Dia Da Costa (review)

The increasing use of creativity as a tool for socioeconomic development and urban regeneration demands greater academic attention to the role of the arts within global capitalist development. But while theatre and performance scholarship has been well-attuned to this phenomenon in the global North, scholars have been less attentive to the cultural logics of the creative economy in the South. Dia Da Costa’s latest book, Politicizing Creative Economy: Activism and a Hunger Called Theater, rethinks the discourse of creative economy by examining its evolution in postcolonial India, where a Hindu cultural nationalism has embraced the power of the arts in order to revitalize urban living. The Indian government’s “world class” city aspirations work in tandem with UN initiatives that deploy cultural production and artistic agency to generate entrepreneurial energies, build infrastructure, and alleviate poverty in the global South. Employing a transnational feminist approach, Da Costa’s critical ethnography of activist performance—a germane (yet often unrecognized) site for interrogating the regional impacts of global cultural policy—lays bare the violence of creative economy’s exploitation of artisan livelihoods and histories. Her book focuses on two activist theatre groups, Jana Natya Manch (Janam) and Budhan Theatre (BT). These two case studies provide an intimate glance into the diverse modes of being, belonging, hope, and survival felt by performers from different social backgrounds and proximities to power. By exploring these two companies Da Costa challenges the optimism that surrounds creative economic theory by revealing the messiness of its realities for communities that hunger for the arts in the neoliberal present.

In her first chapter Da Costa challenges the presumed novelty of the creative economy through a historiographic analysis of India’s longstanding use of creativity as a resource for social betterment. Since independence in 1947, India’s five-year planning schemes have emphasized cultural production as integral to nation-building, with the state facilitating the commodification of subaltern performance repertoires as an engine of rural modernization. The marketization of indigenous folk forms was couched in developmental nationalist terms wherein artists were viewed as victims in need of saving by the postcolonial state. This is particularly visible in the handicraft market, for example—an artisanal practice that became commercialized into a promising small industry that bounded India’s rich “heritage” traditions to international corporate chains. In contrast, processes of neoliberal restructuring since economic liberalization in 1991 and the Hinduization of national politics have discursively transformed artists into enterprising agents, shrouding their precarious labor through languages of empowerment. In spite of the creative economy’s aspiration to rejuvenate jobs and infrastructure through the vibrant potential of the arts, Da Costa shows how creative mandates instead decrease artisanal productivity while nurturing Hindutva ethnic supremacy and corporate capitalism.

Chapter 2 situates the creative economy within the distinct, yet related structures of colonial rule and relationships among caste, religion, and communal violence in Delhi and Ahmedabad, homes to Janam and BT, respectively. Provincializing the social and urban histories of these two cities challenges narratives of creative economy as an institution originating and unfolding exclusively in the global North, and reveals how creative economy has historically worked to Hinduize urban space, while using art and heritage to obscure histories of violence. The aesthetic remaking of Delhi’s infrastructure into “clean, green Delhi” has displaced the poor, while sanitizing the city’s histories of communal and colonial violence, evidenced in recent construction projects like the pristine Akshardham temple. Similarly, Ahmedabad, capital of Gujarat and historically a site of Hindu sectarian violence, is being transformed into a clean, cosmopolitan, and corporatized city since the “Vibrant Gujarat” development scheme was introduced in 2003. Architectural designs for this campaign, which ironically aim to reconstruct Ahmedabad’s plazas and riverbanks into global, inclusive spaces of leisure, display Hindus worshiping on city streets, while the presence of Muslim mosques, butcher shops, and people are notably absent. Such plans evidence the falsity of creative economy’s claim to...