The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala

Abstract

The south Indian state of Kerala has a five-decade long history of large-scale circular labour migration to the Gulf. The Gulf migration has immensely changed the cultural and material scapes of Kerala. However, there is also a prevalent understanding that it is only now that we begin to understand the heavy personal and social costs to the migrants and their families at which this transformation has taken place. This work argues that the hitherto ignorance regarding the reality of the Gulf is an effect of the specific historical and structural conditions in Kerala and the Gulf which forced the Gulf experience into the realm of the private. The historical and structural conditions which consigned the Gulf as an experience to silence in public is a local manifestation of bordering that is characteristic of late capitalism. This volume takes a host of literary and visual texts by Gulf migrants, beginning in the late 1970s, to read in them the contradicting forces of staging borders on the one hand, and how the migrants sought to translate their private experience of the Gulf into a public idiom that could form affective ties with other migrants to the Gulf and the non-migrants back home. The Gulf migrant archives this work studies includes memoirs, novels, films, and personal photographs.