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CHAPTER 1
Queer Regions
Imagining Kerala from the Diaspora
I write these words from Saadiyat Island in Abu Dhabi, the site of abiding controversy surrounding the labor conditions that went into the construction of several high-profile cultural institutions on the island, including the university where I work. Thanks to the advocacy of activist organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Gulf Labor Coalition, a fair amount of attention has been given to the often deplorable living and working conditions of the primarily South Asian male construction workers in Abu Dhabi who build the global outposts of elite cultural institutions in the area. Less remarked upon are the messy, heterogeneous queer socialities that are created by working-class migrants in the shadow of the luxury buildings that dominate the Abu Dhabi skyline — the museums and college campuses, the high-end hotels and shopping malls — and constructed, maintained, and serviced with their labor. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that homosexuality remains illegal in the United Arab Emirates, mundane locales in Abu Dhabi — its waterfront promenade and vegetable markets, its taxis and buses — also function for those in the know as sites of gay male cruising and queer sociality. The largest percentage of the UAE's South Asian migrant population is Malayalam-speaking, from the state of Kerala that runs along the southwest border of India; South Asian diasporic socialities in the UAE and elsewhere are often structured precisely around such subnational regional/linguistic affiliations rather than simply around national affiliations.
I open with this evocation of the particular and peculiar landscape of Abu Dhabi — and, more specifically, of the modalities through which both queerness and Kerala take shape in Abu Dhabi — because it provides an especially striking instance of how queerness emerges in the space where conventional indices of spatial scale, such as region, nation, and diaspora, collide, collapse, and coalesce. This chapter homes in on one of these indices, the region, and contends that it provides a valuable vantage point from which to view queerness differently, just as queerness provides a particularly valuable vantage point from which to view the region differently. By "region" here, I mean subnational spaces such as Kerala and Abu Dhabi, but also supranational regional spaces such as the Indian Ocean and its flows of traffic and travel which, over the course of centuries, have rendered proximate these and other apparently disparate geographic sites. Indeed I find it useful to mine the plasticity of the term, which can reference both subnational and supranational formations simultaneously. And by "queerness" here, I reference not only nonnormative sexual practices, desires, affiliations, and gender embodiments, but also the alternative ways of seeing (and sensing) space, scale, and temporality made available by this collision of the regional and the diasporic. As such, my project is aligned with recent work that calls on queer studies to engage more deeply with the geopolitical, particularly with the spatial and epistemological concepts of the region and the area, along with the more frequently engaged concepts of diaspora and nation. Thinking queerness through the region, and the region through queerness, demands that we understand a site such as Abu Dhabi as one of intersecting queer regional diasporas: here, migrants laboring under various conditions of duress create vibrant queer socialities — often structured around regional affiliations — that navigate the exigencies imposed upon them by multiple nation-states. These social worlds may very well be contingent, temporary, and transitory, but they may also provide moments of queer intimacy, pleasure, and respite. As I discuss further in the following chapter, such instances of queer world-making can easily be obscured if our critical lens is trained solely on the most obvious and recognizable forms through which political agency takes shape, such as labor actions and protests. Much of the popular and academic literature on migrant labor in the Gulf focuses on South Asian male "bachelor builders" and invariably presumes the existence of a heteropatriarchal family unit that these men are a part of and that they leave behind. While this may indeed be the case for many migrant subjects, it nevertheless does not preclude the possibility that they may also be a part of queer social worlds, both regional and diasporic. In other words, I want to suggest that the "Gulf dreams" of many migrants may extend beyond limited heteronormative framings. If working-class migrants are viewed as heterogeneous, desiring subjects rather than reductively defined simply through their labor, what other longings and forms of relationality come into view in the homosocial, regional, and diasporic spaces they inhabit?
We can approach these questions by turning to the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora, for it is in the space of the aesthetic that we can apprehend the "warm data" of migrant sociality. "Warm data," as I discuss in chapter 4, is a term used by artists Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani to refer to the realms of the sensorial and the affective that are effaced by the U.S. state's attempt to discursively and materially "fix" and locate the thousands of South Asian and Middle Eastern men detained after 9/11 as potential terrorist threats. In restoring to these detainees the "warm data" denied them by the state, Ganesh and Ghani turn the surveilling, scrutinizing gaze of the state back on itself. Ironically, some of the popular and scholarly accounts of low- wage migrant labor in the Gulf tend to replicate this homogenizing gaze, to the extent that they efface precisely the "warm data" of those they purportedly centralize. Turning to the aesthetic counters the investment in normative, institutional modes of data collection, categorization, and classification that are apparent on the part of dominant state mechanisms as well as even some progressive scholarly and activist endeavors.
The aesthetic practices of queer diaspora are one site where the categories of queer, diaspora, and region collide, and where they are thereby transformed, undone, and remade. These aesthetic practices bypass the nation as they enact a queer restaging of the region from the vantage point of diaspora. In so doing, they disorganize not only conventional spatial scales, but also the temporal valences associated with these scales. The dominant temporal framings of the region in its subnational sense — as anachronistic, atavistic, and timeless — are both referenced and revised by the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora. Both of the texts I consider in this chapter — Ligy Pullappally's 2004 film Sancharram, and the visual art of David Dasharat Kalal — situate the subnational region of Kerala as the locus and point of departure from which to imagine alternative logics of gender and sexuality, time and space. Both texts engage in a project of queer archiving, in that they memorialize these alternative logics; as such, they encapsulate the interplay of archive, region, affect, and aesthetics that concern me throughout this book.
Kerala serves as a particularly interesting case study through which to explore the nexus of queerness, region, nation, and diaspora, given both its complicated relation to the Indian nation writ large, and its long-standing imbrication within the global economy. While it is outside the scope of this chapter to give a thorough accounting of these histories of Kerala — in relation to Indian nationalism on the one hand, and to global influences on the other — it is necessary to at least acknowledge them here. The region has the potential to simultaneously disrupt and reinforce hegemonic state nationalist discourses; this becomes particularly clear when we look at how Kerala, at different historical moments, has been made representative of the Indian nation even as it was fixed as marginal and excentric to a nationalist project. The very framing of Kerala as a region replicates the logic of the Nehruvian nationalist project: modern-day Kerala came into existence in 1956, when the three different political units of Malabar, Kochi, and Tiruvitamkoor were merged into a single, linguistically defined state by the central government. The Kerala example makes very clear the ways in which the region is a temporally and spatially defined category, one that shifts meaning across both space and time.
In terms of its insertion within a global system of exchange of bodies, commodities, capital, and culture, modern-day Kerala bears the traces of extensive premodern trade routes with the Middle East, China, and Europe, and sits at the crossroads of Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian cultural influences. In the latter half of the twentieth century, Kerala rose to international prominence with the institution of a democratically elected communist government in 1957. One of the latest phases of Kerala's engagement with the global economy began during the oil boom in the 1970s, as thousands of skilled and semiskilled laborers sought employment in the Persian Gulf. Malayali migrants' remittances from the Gulf have dramatically shifted the local landscape of Kerala over the past four decades, even as the influx of Malayali migrants has in turn transformed the landscape of Gulf cities. Interestingly, the work of Pullappally and Kalal evokes not a thoroughly globalized present-day Kerala but rather an earlier, imagined history of the region (which, at least in Pullappally's case, wipes out this long history of immersion within a global economy); this imagined history provides the fodder for queer diasporic reimaginings of the region in the present. While the work of Pullappally and Kalal undoubtedly traffics in what we can term a regional nostalgia, it nevertheless allows us to parse out both the uses and the limits of viewing queerness from the vantage point of the region, and of viewing the region from the vantage point of queerness.
In this chapter, my focus on Kerala in particular as (imagined) region is also driven by more personal investments. My own family is from Kerala, and I spent the early years of my childhood in Ottapalam, a then-small town in central Kerala, and the site of my family home, Palat House. The house was built by my great-grandmother at the time of her marriage, in 1920; she deliberately designed it in a way that drew from traditional Kerala architectural styles but constituted a "modern" break from the structure of the taravad in which she herself had grown up. For close to a century, Palat House has been the place where members of my family, far-flung throughout the diaspora, reconvene. The house remains standing today, albeit in a radically transformed state: much of the front yard is now replaced by a major road, while the house itself is half its former size. I still have a deep visceral connection to this place, and to Kerala in general, although it has never been "home" in any easy sense: my ability to speak Malayalam has slipped away from me, and I never spent a significant amount of time in Kerala as an adult. Nevertheless, my connection to India (the place of my birth) is made not primarily through a national identification, but through this regional connection to Kerala, however attenuated and fragile this connection may be. The centrality of the region as a deeply affective site within a queer diasporic imaginary remained unaddressed in my first book, Impossible Desires, which was for the most part focused on disrupting a nation-diaspora hierarchy; indeed, the region was not an operative category in the book. The genesis of this chapter — and Unruly Visions as a whole — lies in my desire to address this lacuna within Impossible Desires, and the field of queer diaspora studies more generally, as it has emerged in the past decade or so.
The question of regional nostalgia and my own fraught relation to Kerala was (quite literally) brought home to me when I attended at San Francisco's Castro Theatre a sold-out screening of Sancharram, the lesbian- themed independent feature film directed by the Chicago-based, South Asian diasporic filmmaker Ligy Pullappally. Sancharram first premiered in 2005 in both mainstream and queer film festivals in the U.S., and the screening I attended at the Castro was part of the San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival. I had heard that Sancharram (translated as The Journey in English) depicted a burgeoning love affair between two schoolgirls growing up in a small town in rural Kerala. Not since Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), released close to a decade earlier, had a feature film set within India dealt so explicitly with the theme of lesbian desire, and I was curious why Sancharram's release in India hadn't garnered any of the controversy that Fire's had; I was unconvinced that the markedly different responses to each film — heated debate surrounding the latter, acclaim or benign indifference toward the former — could be explained solely by the different political climates of their respective historical moments. Filmed entirely in Malayalam, Sancharram was (and, at the time of this writing, still is) the only queer Indian film not in English or Hindi, but in a regional language, to circulate transnationally in the international film festival circuit. As the lights dimmed, I felt a jolt of recognition: one of the first scenes opened with a montage of shots of an old Nair taravad. The distinctive architecture of the house's sloped tiled roofs, the solid teak pillars, hanging brass lamps, and walls replete with old family portraits brought to mind my own family home of Palat House, to which I would return during periodic trips to Kerala. As the camera lingered on these prototypical signifiers of "Kerala culture," I was fully conscious of how the film's framing of a "typical" Nair taravad was fixing "Kerala tradition" as timeless and unchanging, as well as rendering it synonymous with a particular elite (Hindu/Nair) caste and class status. Nevertheless, I could not deny that, as a diasporic viewer, these images also powerfully hailed me: there was something richly seductive about the reassuring if uncanny familiarity of this nostalgic representation of the region. As the camera panned across a landscape of lush forests and waterfalls, I became convinced that the film was set in Ottapalam, where Palat House is located; the final credits confirmed my suspicion. Yet while I instantly recognized Sancharram's cinematic landscape, it also, curiously, disoriented me. Despite the fact that the film is meant to take place in the present, the Ottapalam I saw onscreen was nothing like the noisy, bustling, dusty town that exists today; rather, it depicted the far more tranquil, rural space I remember from my childhood. For me, the disjuncture of time and space enacted by the film both evoked and defamiliarized an intimate, familial landscape, particularly as I watched the lesbian narrative unfold in the Castro Theatre, surrounded by a, cheering, mostly white, queer San Francisco film festival audience. This viewing experience made me wonder about the ways in which diasporic representations of the region (in this case, Kerala), and its particular logics of gender and sexuality, are rendered pleasurable and intelligible within national and transnational circuits of reception and consumption, for diasporic and nondiasporic viewers alike.
Around the same time, an old friend and activist colleague, David Dasharath Kalal, shared with me a series of recently completed images that formed part of a larger digital art project entitled Kalalabad. Much like the work of contemporary U.S. artist Kehinde Wiley, which reappropriates and resignifies the genre of Old Master portraiture by replacing its traditional subjects with heroic, homoerotic images of contemporary Black youth, Kalal's Kalalabad reimagines iconic Orientalist art historical landscapes by repopulating them with his own image and those of other contemporary queer diasporic South Asians in his hometown of New York City. One set of images in Kalalabad, entitled RV RV:Ravi Varma Recreational Vehicle, was particularly striking to me: here, Kalal digitally remakes the canonized oil paintings of the artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906), who was born in present-day Kerala and is commonly termed the "father of modern Indian art" and of Indian portraiture in particular. Varma's work still circulates widely as mass-market lithographs and prints throughout India; cheap reproductions of his portraits of Indian women — many of which are of Kerala Nair women in particular — can be found in middle-class Indian homes in India and in the diaspora, and have come to serve as signifiers of iconic "Kerala culture." (The opening scenes of Sancharram, for instance, reveal the walls of the taravad's dark interior to be adorned with several of Varma's paintings, or reproductions thereof.) Kalal's restaging of Varma's work transposes the late-nineteenth-century elite Nair women who are the usual subjects of Varma's portraits with images of contemporary queer diasporic South Asian women of specifically Nair descent. Kalal himself describes RV RV as "a series of iconic ironic objects and images that merge the relentlessly duplicated Ravi Varma paintings, prints and oleographs with contemporary diasporic portraiture." One such image restages a typical Varma portrait from the late nineteenth century, entitled Malabar Girl, which depicts an elaborately dressed and coiffed Nair woman holding a veena as she sits in a plush, high-Victorian-era-style interior. Kalal's remake transposes my own face onto the body of Varma's female figure; the background is transformed from a Victorian domestic interior to the red brick exterior of the building in New York City where I grew up. The image is meant to be humorous, and indeed it made me laugh out loud the first time I saw it; through its humor and parody, it raised for me important questions about this turn to a specific regional, caste- and class-inflected historical formation in the past in order to recast, as it were, contemporary queer diasporic identity in the present.
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Excerpted from "Unruly Visions"
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