The spectacular ordinariness of the Arabian Gulf in Kerala: Exploring the thing of migration
The migration from the Indian state of Kerala to the Arabian Gulf is credited with giving rise to consumerist culture. The households of Gulf migrants in Kerala are found to have better access to technology and improved conditions of living. The cultural matrix in which these technologies and foreig...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa
2023-07-01
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| Series: | Arabian Humanities |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/arabianhumanities/10116 |
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| Summary: | The migration from the Indian state of Kerala to the Arabian Gulf is credited with giving rise to consumerist culture. The households of Gulf migrants in Kerala are found to have better access to technology and improved conditions of living. The cultural matrix in which these technologies and foreign goods made their meanings and mobilize affects is under-researched. Taking the case of a canned powdered milk, Nido, as a spectral presence of the Gulf in Kerala, this paper, veered towards a singular reading drawing on mainstream films, and a variety of Keralan Gulf migrant archives, examines the ways in which the canned milk powder entered existing cultural values and produced discourses around itself, while also being an excess to discourse. The paper illustrates the enmeshed nature of migration, in which materials cross borders and purposes, is imputed with essences, or pass on from the spectacular to the quotidian. The paper argues that the contradictions of the Gulf migration — the limits of migration induced mobility in Kerala on the one hand, and the denial of citizenship in the Gulf on the other — is resolved through spectrality that the Gulf migration is projected and experienced as. |
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| ISSN: | 2308-6122 |