KCHR Public Talk
by
Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil
Date and Time: August 22, 2024 | 3 pm IST
To join : https://zoom.us/j/99094960909
Abstract: One of the central issues regarding the study of Gulf migration in Kerala was the question of the translation of archives into legibility. In this case, it was not the paucity of archives that was the problem: a lot of work has already been done on the Gulf migration phenomenon in Kerala. Rather, what was noteworthy was the discord between this publicly legible archive and the other archive, that of lore and gossip and rumour that shaped our understanding of the Gulf migrant experience. There was both the need to understand the cause and scope of this archive as well pursue ways of bringing it into the protocols of academic writing. The concept of ‘borderland’ became thus a frame through which Kerala could be looked at as well as the method by which it could be unpacked to make space anew for the liminal archives. In this introductory talk to the monograph The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala, the author will be discussing the nature of the liminal archives and the borderland as a methodological strategy.
About the speaker: Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is Associate Professor at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal Academy of Higher Education. Besides the monograph The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging, his contributions to the field include chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures, The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature, a co-edited (with E. Dawson Varughese) symposium on ‘The Gulf-Kerala Literary Public’ for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and numerous academic and mainstream publications.