Transnational Ethical Screens: Empathetic Networks in Malayalam Short Films from the Gulf

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doi:10.2979/filmhistory.32.3.06

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‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

Karinkurayil

2022

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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This paper is an exploration of cinematic memory as a resource for remembering large-scale Keralan migration to the Gulf since the late 1960s. The south Indian state of Kerala, which predominantly speaks Malayalam, is a major contributor to the migrant labour force in the Gulf region for the last five decades. However, until recently, the migrant figured in the public discourse of Kerala as an economic agent alone. There has been increasing instances of memorialising the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere since the beginning of the 2000s which brings to light the subjective aspects of the Gulf migration. However, what is lost in these accounts is the simultaneity and interlinked nature of the two places. Cinema, on the other hand, offers resources to inscribe the mutuality of the two places in the collective memory of Kerala. Invoking Pierre Nora’s concept of places of memory, the paper looks at cinematic renditions of ‘Dubai’ as one such site of memory in the present when the image of Dubai and the profile of Keralan migrant has undergone a shift. Taking the example of one Malayalam film, Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), and tracing its cinematic genealogy, this paper analyses the ways in which ‘Dubai’ is remembered and how this remembrance inscribes the Gulf as part of the collective memory of Kerala. The paper identifies the persistence of filmed space, intertextuality, and the archivality of the star body as the modes in which cinematic memory achieves this collective memorialisation. The mutuality between Kerala and Dubai, offered by cinematic memory, allows it to be an act of affective citizenship on the part of the migrants, i.e. embodied and sensorial acts of claiming the universal right to have rights.

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‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

Karinkurayil

2022

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala

Karinkurayil

2024

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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.

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Introduction

Karinkurayil

2024

The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala

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This chapter details the historical and structural conditions in Kerala and in the Arab Gulf that have resulted in the Gulf migrant experience of Keralans being presented as a secret in Kerala that calls out for constant revelations through novels, memoirs, and films. The chapter reads both Kerala and the Gulf as borderlands where multiple demarcations crisscross the migrant body. The chapter situates Kerala as the location in which the Keralan Gulf texts are read. The chapter presents translations between the Gulf and Kerala and the affiliation this enables as the main objective of the study. The chapter then discusses methodological issues and concludes with an overview of the book.

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Transnational Ethical Screens: Empathetic Networks in Malayalam Short Films from the Gulf

Cited by 10 publications

References 0 publications

‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

‘Dubai’ as a Place of Memory in Malayalam Cinema

The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala

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