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Artists, musicians, and writers have always been great travellers. Today, their talent circulates in new ways, and takes new forms, as the creative industries expand globally in a marriage of media technology and the traditional arts. The growing international market for cultural talent can do much to help countries diversify their economies, and improve quality of life more broadly. The creative industries are subject to strong clustering effects, with talent moving swiftly to the most vibrant clusters, not always to the advantage of the poorer countries which can lose talent to the richer world. Countries that protect intellectual property rights, educate and train their talent, and maintain politically open and liberal societies will have a head start in the global creative economy.

This chapter introduces transnational feminist and affect theory frameworks, two activist troupes, and key concepts of sentimental capitalism and hunger called theater to argue the significance of analyzing a global discursive regime of creative economy policy within the same analytical frame as activist performance. Highlighting recent articulations, affects, and contradictions of Indian creative economy policy, it presents shifting discursive and political histories. Rather than focusing on capital-rich cultural production, it makes a case for attending to unrecognized creativity within activist performance whilst analyzing the latter’s messy collaborations with hegemonic regimes of creativity. Outlines the book’s organization: Part 1 historically and spatially locates a global discursive regime in India, Ahmedabad, and Delhi; Parts 2 and 3 are ethnographies of the two troupes.

This chapter deals with the influence of the Scottish National Party (SNP) on cultural policy and creative economy. Scotland's asymmetrical institutional framework and policy capacity across the interlinked fields of broadcasting and culture is shown. The Scottish Broadcasting Commission (SBC)'s recommendation came at a time of great volatility in television. Scotland has a plurality of supply in public service broadcasting. The demand for ‘broadcasting devolution’ has been deeply entangled with control over the news agenda in Scotland. The neo-liberal assumptions embedded in the New Labour project live on in the SNP's proposed cultural lead body. The Labour government appears to be reluctant to yield any control over broadcasting developments in Scotland. Much now hangs on whether a workable structure emerges from Creative Scotland's long and unsettling gestation period.

The introduction argues that creative-economy frameworks incorporate ideas bearing a literary provenance: that the best work expresses the interiority of talented individuals; that the creative realm is a space of pure introspection unbounded by necessity; and that people serious about their work will be motivated by internal directives to which profit is irrelevant. It argues, moreover, that when writers mark their own distance from art's instrumental applications they find particularly rich material because readers of literature are themselves inclined to disavow instrumental goals as secondary to immaterial goods like self-knowledge, authenticity, originality, and happiness. Literature's anti-instrumental and self-critical gestures are marketable because they exemplify and model larger cultural mores.

This chapter provides an outline of the way that creativity has been defined and deployed by neoliberal government policy and management thought. It begins with a reading of Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class, which has become a handbook for government officials and done more than any other work to crystallize and disseminate globally the instrumental conception of culture that has become common under neoliberal governance. It then discusses the New Labour government's emphasis on creativity as the particular form of expertise that would secure the postindustrial UK's viability within the global economy, and considers how and why the creative-economy concept became a key branding strategy for New Labour. It also considers the relationship between New Labour cultural policy and the policies of the conservative governments that came before and after New Labour.

The conclusion draws out main findings and contributions of a book that provides historical, spatial and ethnographic specificity to creative economy discourses and their critiques. It calls for provincializing creative economy discourses everywhere that they circulate; charting out and seeing the relational constitution of what counts as creativity in hegemonic and unrecognized creative practices; and attending to a visceral materialism that traces the complex formation of embodied knowledge produced in structures of production, rule and feeling. Ultimately, the praxis of the two troupes and the creative, transformative potential embedded in their suffering, despair and pessimism not only indicates and explains their hunger called theater, it also reminds us to reimagine creative economy in the image of creativity rather than the other way around.

The introductory chapter sets the book within the context of the existing literature from the areas of sociology and law as they relate to the creative industries. It notes the long-standing dichotomy between creativity and business that is often reproduced in scholarship on this area of the creative and cultural economy. It draws attention to political reliance on creative industries as a source of value and the reality of precarious labour and structural inequalities that characterize work in the sector. It introduces our theoretical approach, drawn from sociological studies of ‘marketization’ and describes our analytical framing: the IP/IPR nexus. It provides short summaries of subsequent chapters.

This chapter asks whether another creative economy is possible—one that negotiates and goes beyond the terms of hegemonic neoliberal and Hindu constructions of creative economy. It argues that Budhan Theater provides a glimpse of such a creative economy born in the crucible of ongoing betrayals in their pursuit of rehabilitation from criminalized histories. They find ways of making their creative practices overcome the deadly inseparability of the ways in which the police and governmental patronage of Chhara survival continues to patronize Chhara stigma. Budhan Theater this chapter argues, finds a line of flight that refuses the divisive sectarianism and the violent, hegemonic patronage systems within which the conditions of survival for the urban poor and the politics among the oppressed has become contained in India.

This chapter historically locates the creative economy global discursive regime in the Indian context whilst challenging the presumed newness of creative economy policy. Tracing Indian policy debates over culture and development since the 1950s, it demystifies the seeming contradictions between disjuncture and continuity in policy by considering the sentiments deployed in India’s planning process. India’s political economic transition from development nationalism to neoliberal capitalism is accompanied by a shift from sentimental nationalism and its pity for artisanal victims of planned industrialization in the 1950s toward sentimental capitalism and its optimism about the poor’s artistic entrepreneurialism in the new millennium. Hindu culturalisms and neoliberal commodification combine to sell pride and optimism as means of reinventing Indian heritage—lending a global discourse traction.

While the general public engages in varying levels of it, the models and modeling professionals I spoke to for this study claimed they felt as though they were never off duty and were always at work to produce the right “look” in person, in photographs, and online. Model agents made it clear that it matters where models live, where they eat and shop, and on which airline they travel. As this chapter explores, some respondents reported being told explicitly by their agents they had to put on the show all the time, even if they were just running around the corner to do an errand, mindful of the impression they might make as they are out and about, conscious of their online image created by the photos snapped of them in fashionable neighborhoods or at social events and posted to blogs or websites dedicated to documenting the modeling world. It seems like a lot of work, but models who really want to “make it” report trying to make it look fun to be exposed in this way, to be “on” all the time, to be out there in the spotlight, as often as humanly possible.

Introducing the book as a whole, this chapter examines how the arts sector and wider creative economy are evolving, particularly in the context of austerity. The idea of cultural intermediation is introduced, building on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to examine how organisations and individuals attempt to use cultural activity as a tool to improve the lives of individuals living in deprived communities. Austerity economics has had a major impact on the work of intermediaries, with communities simultaneously made responsible for solving their own socioeconomic problems, while the institutions with the capacity to mitigate inequality have been eroded through funding cuts. The cultural deficit model is challenged, noting that exposure to arts activities in and of itself does little to overcome entrenched inequality and social exclusion. The chapter also introduces the wider case studies used within the book, primarily examining the UK, with a particular ethnographic focus on the neighbourhoods of Ordsall in Salford and Balsall Heath in Birmingham.

The creative economy is driven by the transfer of property; tradable property is the ‘product’ of the creative industries. The chapter explores how intellectual property (IP)/intellectual property rights (IPR) function to constitute creative work as a market object that can be disentangled and sold. The chapter deals first with the performative role of law in constructing market objects. We examine how law, with its focus on authorship and originality, embodies a particular conception of solitary artistic creation, inherited from nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetics; at the same time, the law also mandates property rights as a means of constituting a market object, and these property rights necessitate a creator to whom they can attach. Both aspects seem highly artificial in view of the collaborative and collective processes that produce creative work and it becomes clear that creative producers have to manage this multifaceted, liminal object in the shape of the IP/IPR nexus.

The chapter considers the construction of economic agency among creative producers in the creative industries. It argues that a form of economic agency, homo oeconomicus, is facilitated by engagement with IP/IPR. This involves understanding work as a means of securing money, as opposed to an obligation ‘to one’s art’; a specific attitude to time, in terms of a relationship to the present and also a control over the future; and action underpinned with knowledge of economic and technical issues, rather than being guided solely by the social milieu and group of one’s fellow creatives and collective cultural habits. IP/IPR introduces a temporal dimension central to economic calculation, and helps agents to distinguish tradable assets while disentangling themselves from them. Chapter 3 also picks up the ambivalences of business and creativity among ‘cultural entrepreneurs’, discussing self-employment and precarity in the creative economy.

Creative industries are beset by a problem: nobody knows how work will be received. The chapter examines how creative producers manage the pervasive uncertainty of creative work. In classical theories of enterprise, uncertainty is the source of opportunity and therefore profits, with the entrepreneur the market agent willing to organize that uncertainty in pursuit of return. We show that risk and uncertainty in the creative economy are managed through the same processes of symbolic production as give rise to creative goods and creative agency, mediated by the IP/IPR nexus; as creative products solidify into market goods so the uncertainties are transformed—at least in part—into risks, and the management of uncertainty through the social relations of the field develops into the legalistic protection of IP rights and contracts.

This chapter discusses the production of public queer cultures as sites of media consumption. The recent development of a global media hub in Singapore has enabled the emergence of a queer public culture despite the illegality of homosexuality. State-funded gay films, subsidized theater plays, Internet portals, and nightclubs are part of the new spaces and practices that have been direct beneficiaries of this policy initiative. In a city-state such as Singapore, cultural citizenship is contested through the way sexuality functions as a technology for the creative economy. While the government has mobilized sexuality as a policy tool to promote cultural liberalization, gays and lesbians have also seized on these practices to claim their right to produce and participate in public culture. The chapter thus evaluates how lesbians “do” citizenship and fashion modes of expression through their media consumption that allow them to fit in, use, and twist the governmental framing of media environments.

This chapter argues that New Orleans, cosmopolitan center of world culture, faced an uncertain future following the devastations of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, 2005, and Deepwater Horizon, 2010. It argues that, in order to survive, the city has followed a global pattern of arts-led urban regeneration. The “holy trinity” of New Orleans, history, music, and food has been kept alive through an investment in and focus on its creative economy, notably New Orleans music, visual arts, film, TV, and literature, with tourism at its center. Citizens have engaged in post-Katrina recordings of personal testimony and oral histories, and their commitment to the city’s future, as well as international support for its creative industries and heritage, offer hope for a sustainable New Orleans.