This book rethinks the hegemonic and sentimental optimism around the arts and creative economy by politicizing a global discursive regime that effectively asks the poor to eat heritage. Critical scholarship largely views creative economy as new, as applicable to the de-industrializing global North, and as neoliberal commodification and governmentality. It neglects complex and intersecting histories of national, colonial, development, and progressive politics; longstanding uses of creative practices to remake economies and polities; and spatial specificities that give a global discourse tractio ... More

This book rethinks the hegemonic and sentimental optimism around the arts and creative economy by politicizing a global discursive regime that effectively asks the poor to eat heritage. Critical scholarship largely views creative economy as new, as applicable to the de-industrializing global North, and as neoliberal commodification and governmentality. It neglects complex and intersecting histories of national, colonial, development, and progressive politics; longstanding uses of creative practices to remake economies and polities; and spatial specificities that give a global discourse traction. Attending to historical, spatial, and ethnographic complexities, this book probes discursive planning and activist politics intersectionally. Focusing on India, the analysis juxtaposes nationalist and progressive histories alongside critical ethnographies of two activist performance troupes: Communist-affiliated, Jana Natya Manch, and the indigenous Chhara’s (former ‘criminal tribe’) community-based Budhan Theatre. The subtle invasions of commodification, heritage, and management into performance make activist theater a crucial site for considering what counts as creativity in the cultural politics of creative economy. A transnational feminist approach drives this exploration of precarious lives, livelihoods, and ideologies at the intersection of heritage, planning, and performance. By analyzing the creators, performers, and activists involved—individuals at the margins of creative economy and society—it builds a provocative argument. Their creative practices may survive, challenge, and even reinforce the economies of death, displacement, and divisiveness used by the urban poor to survive