The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala

The Lecture

The Gulf migrants are often accused of silence when describing their real-life experiences as labourers in the Gulf. Worse, they are even accused of making it look more attractive to others than it is. How is one to make sense of this silence and lure?

Taking the instance of the migrants from the south Indian state of Kerala, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil will detail the reasons for this silence in Kerala's specific historical and cultural context. Known as the bastion of cosmopolitan, progressive politics, Kerala is one of the successful examples of migrant culture, benefitting enormously from the economic and cultural remittances of the migrants. However, the speaker would argue, the specific form that progressive politics took in Kerala also led to the invisibilisation of the migrant from public discourse and instead subjected them to being objects of other genres of speech such as rumour and gossip. This talk will examine the conditions for such privatisation of the migrant experience in Kerala.

The Speaker (Author)

Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil is an Associate Professor at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, a constituent unit of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), India. He received PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He is the author of The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala: Reading Borders and Belonging (Oxford University Press, 2024). He has co-edited (with E. Dawson Varughese) a symposium on 'The Gulf-Kerala Literary Public' for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. His other research outputs include publications in The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (eds. Ulka Anjaria and Anjali Nerlekar, 2024), The Routledge Companion to Migration Literature (eds. Gigi Adair, Rebecca Fasselt and Carly McLaughlin, 2025), Arabian Humanities, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, South Asian Diaspora, Society and Culture in South Asia, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, among others.

Registration

Everyone is welcome to attend. Please register using the web form on this page. We will send you a Zoom link shortly before the event.