With the changing time, South and East Asia as geopolitical units have witnessed several youth and student activism which has been the crucial harbingers and the primary source of transformation in political attitudes and socio-cultural aspects through new cycles of protest, mobilisation, and political awareness. Despite the continuing visibility of youth activism, relatively little comparative or ethnographic research has explored the determinants and their conceptual relationship and implication with the aesthetic dimensions and creative possibilities. The paper proposes to examine how protest as a mode or method brings various conceptual aspects of performativity, situated actions, ideological cross-fertilizations, and ‘political’ dimensions of youth performance into the picture. It enquires how youth protests in South Asia become a transformative event, a modality of youth self-fashioning, and a political becoming at different identifiable socio-cultural locations forged by historical events, generational experience, and situational concerns. Primarily focusing on the creative methods of protest around the recent movements like ‘Stop Asian Hate’, ‘#MeToo’, ‘The Sunflower Student Movement’ and ‘The CAA-NRC’, the paper aims to look into the formulation and crafting of an alternative political discourse by the Asian youth. It enquires how aesthetic dimensions, performance, and political imagination get into making a comprehensive counter-narrative and resistance and, thereby, enact a different socio-political production rooted in creativity. It argues that the creative practices of youth effectively shape political narratives and thereby bring possibilities for new political imagination.
