My research analyses development as a process of constructing and challenging material and representational inequality. Thus far, I have used political theatre as my primary lens to analyze development. I am interested in theatre as lens on and vehicle for power relations and social change. This particular focus enables me to analyze the role of culture in legitimizing and contesting development. In particular, I examine who is served and what is accomplished by the invocation and use of culture in development thinking and practice. I query whose meaning of culture counts in development policy and processes. I address these questions in two inter-related ways.
1) Rethinking Spaces of Political Economy: In the last three decades, development thinking and policy has shifted emphasis from income and physical capital, to human capital, social capital, and now cultural capital. Despite these shifts and their valorization of voices of the poor, participation, and culture, in recent decades, global inequality, insecurity, and violence has continued to grow. My research directs attention to the central role of ‘culture’ in materializing, legitimizing, and contesting what counts as inequality and development. Taking political theatre seriously as a space of labour and political action is a research method which goes against the grain of reifying political economy. I began to address this research problem in my book entitled Development Dramas: Reimagining Rural Political Action in Eastern India (Routledge, 2010).
My methodology uses ethnography to analyze cultural practices (or, practices of meaning-making) as everyday and institutional political economy. That is, I view cultural practices as political economy because they entail struggles over meanings and values in social life. Ethnographic method allows me to analyze the question of value in society under global capitalism, while revealing other existing life-worlds that suggest possibilities for survival and livelihood even though they tend to be dispossessed of value within the dominant political history and analysis of development. At the same time, methods of historical sociology enable me to identify cultural interventions as an age-old tool of colonial capitalism rather than a recent innovation of the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of development. As guest editor and contributor for a special issue entitled Relocating Culture in Development and Development in Culture for the journal Third World Quarterly (forthcoming, 2010), I have explored the relationship between culture and development, with other scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds.
2) The Work of Theatre in an Age of Precarious Labour: India has gone from the place of poverty to being the place of cheap labour, outsourced work, huge market, and giant democracy in the global development imaginary. Yet this monumental shift in representing India says little about the realities and meanings of work, development, and democracy for contemporary Indians. Studies show that precarious and exploitative conditions of work have only been exacerbated while organized labour struggle grapples with the challenge of reinventing itself under the constraints of neoliberal globalization.
While theatre is recognized as a public form of political and creative expression used by millions worldwide, theatre is rarely studied as a matter of labor, livelihood, and survival. This project focuses on theatre done by unemployed youth, working classes, sexual minorities, and indigenous populations to analyze whether theatric labor constitutes employment opportunity in times of precarious jobs. My research also considers whether theatric labor can render dominant meanings of labor precarious when it revalues work that was previously stigmatized as unproductive. I plan to focus on four representative uses of theatre in India–Brechtian theatre for the Communist Party of India, theatre of the social left against the organized Left, Magnet theatre for sexuality and sexual health, and theatre that fights the stigma of criminality and rejuvenates livelihood opportunities.
The stage is a space where neoliberal development is materialized by strengthening civil society. The stage also reveals actually existing life-worlds that imagine and live against dominant visions of capitalist development and state disregard for social contract and social life. I examine these cases together to explore to what extent theatre legitimizes and contests development and democracy in modern India. Ultimately, theatre provides a lens through which I hope to analyze the ways in which political activism, work marginalized as unproductive, and workers engaged in precarious work feed and disrupt global capitalism. A book manuscript on this topic is currently being prepared under the provisional title: The Work of Theatre in an Age of Precarious Labour.
