Why Asian Commons? Redefining the Politics of Heritage Making

Foregrounding the limitations of anti-colonial theory, our chapter delineates three trajectories of Asian Commons that, arguably, can be productive to create an alternative and non-colonial mode of modernity. Drawing on the work of Kuan-Hsing Chen (Asia as method: toward deimperialization. Duke University Press, 2010), we first question the phenomenology of decolonization while simultaneously highlighting the shared history of anti-colonial struggles and parallel perspectives for social and economic justice. Second, we attempt to re-orient and decentralize practices of cultural (and knowledge) production and appropriation—not by having the West as the “anchoring” point. Understanding Asian societies as reference points for one another also entails a reorientation of knowledge that occludes the West as the inevitable future. Third, we identify the continuities in the discontinuities for building a dialectical interaction between deimperialization and decolonization. The cultural and political terrain that frames our empirical research is the nomadic Kalbeliya community of Rajasthan in India, whose dance and songs have been recognized as an “Intangible Cultural Heritage” by UNESCO (Ranwa, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 20:20–36, 2021a). We empirically understand the three theoretical trajectories by highlighting the paradox of the Indian State, which, on the one hand, for its own international Western visibility and recognition encourages transnational movement of a few popular Kalbeliya performers but simultaneously marginalizes those with low economic and social capital through (non) recognition. As our empirical work demonstrates, the Euro-American consumption of Kalbeliya culture does not contribute to any viable improvement of this community. Rather, these socio-political processes, in the present, mirror the imperialist histories of political domination, expropriation and repression.