Reading Aspiration in Kerala’s Migrant Photography

This paper engages with the photography of Keralite migrant workers to the Arabian Gulf as an index of diasporic aspiration in terms of social mobility and the emergence of a new social order. Taking as its primary site photographs from a family of migrants from south Malabar, the paper locates the performance of aspiration in these photographs in the disjunctural nature of migration itself, operative in its photographic practices. The mapping of the subjective dimension of migration allows us to see migrants as more than just economic agents.