RETHINKING LABOUR AND THE CREATIVE ECONOMY:
GLOBAL PERFORMATIVE PERSPECTIVES
An international conference organized by the Department of Theatre and Performance
Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi,
February 27, February 28 and March 1, 2015.
Director: Rustom Bharucha
How ‘fluid’ are the conditions of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, and destitution
across the world today? Are so-called ‘First World’ economies preoccupied with the
realities of precarity, or precarious existence, divested of fundamental social and human
securities, now beginning to catch up with the chronic poverty in the cultures of the
South? Or, would it be more accurate to say that while there may be a ‘First World’ in
the ‘Third World’ through new insertions of affluence, and a ‘Third World’ in the ‘First
World’ through new forms of underemployment and invisible poverty, that the
economic and cultural imbalances of these ‘Worlds’ remain more or less intact? These
imbalances are further enhanced by the existing hegemonies of cultural and electronic
capital, which in turn are articulated through diverse understandings and practices of
‘performance’ – articulations in which the intellectual capital of global critical theory is
thoroughly, yet deceptively, embedded.
The primary purpose in holding a conference on labor and the creative economy on the
campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (hereafter JNU) is to attempt a critical
dialogue on how some of the most tenacious categories of the social sciences around
‘labor’ and the ‘economy’ can be interrogated at performative levels. While the subject
of labor has been interrogated at multiple levels in the social sciences, it is a relatively
new area of research in the field of performance studies where labor is now being
explored both in the context of actual performances as well as within the framework of
the ‘creative economy.’ It would be useful to bring together social scientists and
performance researchers to reflect collectively and across disciplinary borders on the
different conditions and manifestations of labor within – and against – the tenets of
cultural industries and the creative economy.
Part of the challenge in holding such a conference in JNU would be to articulate
counter-perspectives on the growing Euro-American discourse on the performativity of
labor, as evident in recent issues of ‘Labor and Performance’ (Performance Research,
January 2013) and ‘Precarity and Performance’ (The Drama Review, December 2012).
Within the immediacies and threats faced by diverse constituencies of Indian laborers,
both in the formal and informal sectors, it would be necessary to question the viability of
Euro-American performative perspectives on labor and the limits of their translatability
into alternative conceptual, economic and historical paradigms in the cultures of the
South. At the same time, the catalytic power of the new performative discourses could
also complicate some of the norms underlying Marxist critiques of the ‘cultural
economy’ and the ‘creative economy’, which have been consolidated in the Indian social
sciences over the years.
As yet, the interface of performance studies and the social sciences in the Indian context
has been extremely limited, with the social sciences (particularly powerful in JNU’s
Marxist-Communist-dalit ideological environment) almost monopolizing the discourse
on ‘hard’ socio-economic realities, with ‘performance’ relegated to the relatively ‘soft’
domains of theatre practice and creative expression. While the critique of a neo-liberal
economy elicits a ready consensus across a wide spectrum of theatre workers and social
scientists, it is quite another matter to assert in a public forum that there are performative
perspectives on labor and the economy which are not adequately confronted or even
acknowledged in the Indian social sciences.
In this regard, key performative concepts relating to ‘affect’, ‘corporeality’,
‘embodiment’, ‘movement’, ‘self-exploitation’, ‘immaterial labor’, and ‘cruel optimism’
have a catalytic role to play in destabilizing some of the assumptions that have been
consolidated over the years by the established Indian Left, in perpetuating earlier
theories of class, workers’ movements, and trade unionism. More recently, through the
important interventions of dalit cultural theory, pertaining to the most downtrodden
sectors of low-caste communities, there are more tacit explorations of labor specifically
in relation to the politics of humiliation and hurt.
The first provocation, therefore, in holding this conference/performance forum at JNU
would be in bringing together diverse constituencies of social scientists and performance
theorists/performers/activists, even as they do not share the same conceptual language.
How can the existing epistemologies of labor in the social sciences be stretched through
critical interventions from performance studies?
The second provocation would focus more stringently on the different materialities of
labor, as manifest through its diverse histories, cultures, and actual practices. Can
performance be said to offer alternative paradigms of materiality that could counterpoint
and question the dominant paradigms of materialism as outlined in political theory and
the social sciences?
Countering the post-Fordist, post-industrial context in which most Euro-American
constructions of labor and the economy are positioned, the Indian context provides a
much vaster panorama of contradictory situations and contexts of labor, ranging from
the most dehumanized forms of pre-industrial, pre-modern labor to the emergence of
new global hubs in the hinterlands of metropolitan cities, where state-of-the-art
technologies are mobilized to create global products. The steady encroachments of the
global economy in contemporary India, along with the weakening of unions and the
privatization of the labor sector, coexist with the harshest and most brutal forms of
manual labor (including scavenging, garbage collection, construction work, and nonirrigated agriculture). The JNU conference will highlight these disparities both within
the Indian economy and in relation to other economies in the world where the global
meltdown has initiated new forms of resistance to the fundamental tenets of capitalism.
How can one forge new alliances in envisioning different modalities of resistance, which
come with their own strategies, methodologies, and technologies? Instead of seeking
‘solutions’ through new formations of global civil society, it will be necessary to open
up critical readings of ‘civil society’ in the Indian context, which have been challenged
by new assertions of ‘political society’ functioning outside the tenets of citizenship and
the discourse of rights. Even more urgently, it will be necessary to juxtapose the muchpublicized ‘performances’ of new movements like Occupy Wall Street with people’s
movements in India relating to the opposition to dams, the privatization of fisheries, the
right to information, the opposition to slum clearance, which are embedded in local and
regional politics with tenuous links to larger global agendas. How are the
performativities of these diverse movements shaped and mobilized? And to what extent
can their discursive structures and modes of organization be mobilized across locations
and contexts?
To provide a brief overview of some of the themes being envisioned for the conference,
one could include the following:
1. Overview on the histories of labor and performance, their interweavings, disjunctions
and conflicts.
2. Performing labor in the larger context of new industrial and economic policies in
Euro-American and ‘New Asian’ contexts, with reference to management strategies
and technologies that, in effect, displace labor. What is the role of governance in
determining the performance of labor in different economies?
3. The Indian context of labor and trade unionism through Marxist historiography,
juxtaposed with the actual performance of labor and strikes through the practices of
street theatre, public protest, and other forms of cultural activism.
4. Dalit narratives and testimonies of labor. To what extent can the social dynamics of
humiliation and hurt be understood within the larger context of an ‘affective
politics’?
5. New migrant narratives of ‘foreign labor’ vis-à-vis earlier histories of indentured
labor and the slave trade represented in subaltern performance traditions like bidesia.
6. New collaborative performances relating to ‘virtual’ forms of labor involving callcentre workers and other modes of anonymous, ‘invisible’ global transaction.
In addition to focusing on intellectual and political debate, which will be the driving
force of the conference part of the JNU event, there will also be a performance forum
devoted to theatrical, musical, multi-media, and activist performances. The idea would
be for these performances to either supplement or to problematize the intellectual
discourse of the conference. All performances will be followed by open-house
discussions with the entire audience. As yet, these are the productions being envisioned
for the performance forum, though none of them has been finalized:
1. Documentation of the work of Rimini Protokoll, the internationally acclaimed
German theatre collective, which has worked with call-center workers in Kolkata on
two earlier productions. The collective has also done performance pieces involving
garbage collectors from Istanbul and muezzins from Cairo.
2. A lecture-performance piece by Lebanese performance/visual artist Rabih Mroue
drawing on his earlier interventions on activist and revolutionary resistance as a form
of political labor.
3. A folk-opera in the khayal style performed by working-class artists from Rajasthan,
who work in sandstone mines or construction sites by day.
4. A concert by India’s leading revolutionary singer Gaddar, whose songs have reached
millions of workers across diverse political rallies and activist insurrections.
5. A film screening of Jhadu Katha (Broom Stories), directed by Navroze Contractor
and conceptualized by Rustom Bharucha, which focuses on the lives of broommakers across diverse caste groups in Rajasthan.
6. A new performance piece on sexual labor by India’s leading performance artist,
Maya Krishna Rao, which could take the form of stand-up comedy.
Rethinking Labour and the Creative Economy: Global Performative Perspectives will be
organized by the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies in the School of Arts
and Aesthetics at JNU. It will take place over three days – February 27, February 28,
and March 1, 2015. While the conference will be held in the auditorium of the School
of Arts and Aesthetics, the performances will take place in different sites on the campus.
A strong attempt will be made to ‘stream’ the conference proceedings to other sites in
the Fluid States topography being organized by Performance Studies International. An
edited version of the proceedings of the conference, including transcripts of lectures and
discussions, will be published as a full-length book and distributed abroad.
The conference will be curated with no open call for papers.
A tentative list of speakers includes Gabriele Klein, Jon McKenzie, Ray Langenbach,
Janelle Reinelt, Sundar Sarukkai, Gopal Guru, Shomo Choudhury, Nivedita Menon,
among others. There will be limited seating for around 200 participants. A special panel
will bring together students researching labor in different cultural, economic and
performative contexts. More details will be provided at a later stage.
For all information relating to the conference, please contact Rustom Bharucha at
rustombh@yahoo.com