Session Name: Un/speakable Bodies. Representations, Reflections, and Resistances Of, Via, and Through ‘The Body’
3 - Whose Time? The Malleable Body and the Temporary Migrants.
Monday, July 29, 2024
16:15 - 18:00 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract The migrant labourers from India to the Arab Gulf are marginalised on both ends. On the one hand, they are understood to be temporary work force, to be relieved after a specific point. On the other, back home, they are understood to be away, and therefore not part of the rhythms of daily life back home. The migrants’ appraisal of their time in the Gulf is that of a temporary arrangement, one that has to be endured for permanent settlement in a state of good life. This paper is an exploration of what time means when one is understood to be temporary. Based on field observations in Kerala, the south Indian state that sends a bulk of its labourers to the Gulf, and in the United Arab Emirates, this paper looks at the crucial role of time as a trope in producing experience of exclusion and precarity among the Gulf migrants. The paper discusses how the migrants negotiate this exclusion and precarity through reimagining time itself. Such reimaginations involve self-understandings of the potentials of the migrant body, and ranging this body in its malleability in its apprehension of a range of governmental and non-governmental agencies. The paper will exemplify situations of breaking down and elasticisation of time that migrants undertake and the agential role they assume in these processes, in order to persevere against the projected absence in state-induced temporariness, and the experienced absence in the rhetoric back home.
.png)