Priya Menon

Troy University, English, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Public Views

Priya Menon is a Professor of Literature at Troy University. A Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow, she is at work on a monograph on migrant fiction from the Gulf States.

less

InterestsView All (26)

Uploads

Papers by Priya Menon

" 'Pravasi Really Means Absence’: Gulf-Pravasis as Spectral Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People"

Menon, P. (2020). "Pravasi Really Means Absence: Gulf-Pravasis as Spectral Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’ s Temporary People’". Journal of South Asian Studies, 43(2), 185-198.,DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2020.1719628., 2020

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s debut text, Temporary People, attempts to explore certain vulnerabilities a... more Deepak Unnikrishnan’s debut text, Temporary People, attempts to explore certain vulnerabilities and anxieties of transience that accompany emigrants to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where citizenship is not an option. By representing one of the largest Gulf diaspora in contemporary history—the Keralan emigrants or pravasis—as spectral figures and as absence-presences that signal a non-present presence in the Gulf, Unnikrishnan’s book attempts to retrieve and register their occulted histories on the Gulf landscape. In particular, this article explores how, by creating a Keralan Gulf-pravasi spectre, Unnikrishnan critically engages with a more varied version of Gulf diasporic experience and, therefore, a more complex definition of emigration itself.

Download

"Kerala's Own Petrofiction: Literary Interventions in Gulf Migration Studies"

Ala: Kerala Scholars @http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/23/keralas-own-petrofiction/, 2020

The discovery and subsequent drilling for oil 1 in the Arabian Gulf States, since the late 20 th ... more The discovery and subsequent drilling for oil 1 in the Arabian Gulf States, since the late 20 th century, continue to have explicit repercussions for Kerala's economy, polity, and society. Despite the recent decrease in migration, the Gulf States still profit from Kerala in numerous ways-around 2.2 2 million emigrants from Kerala form the crux of its labor force, not only in the hydrocarbon industry, but also by extension, in its medical, banking, transportation, hospitality, and educational facilities. The developments of these service and rentier industries have further resulted in large-scale recruitment of "guest-workers," which reflect the magnitudes, trajectories, and potential future concerns of a primarily oildependent Gulf economy 3. Symbiotically, Kerala has also gained significantly from its Gulf migratory resources. Twenty-five percent of Kerala's GDP is still based on Gulf migration. 4 Therefore, it is not surprising that Gulf migration has left a significant mark on Kerala's everyday political, physical, and vernacular landscapes. For instance, its built environmentgold markets, malls, export industrial complexes, restaurants, airports, and enormous gulfhouses 5 , have all been made possible, to a large extent, by the petro-currency of the Gulf. Consequences of the present-day return of Gulf emigrants due to the current COVID-19 crisis along with a recent apathetic disposition for migration 6 are bound to reverberate on the oil-dependent fabric of Kerala's quotidian lived experiences. How are these experiences recorded in Kerala's cultural archives? While the material realities of Gulf emigration get registered in diverse fields ranging from economics to sociology and policymaking, oil's human affects remain scantily recorded and examined in Kerala. Can cultural production of narratives-especially the composition of literary fiction, that creates sites of interpretation, augment the currently dominant policy-oriented, legal, and economic discourse of this distinctive petrocultural interaction between Gulf and Kerala? Are the (un)equal distribution of oil's benefits and consequences imaginatively recorded in Kerala's literary productions? What aspirational values might these texts offer through their interpretational bearings and creative possibilities for a truly sustainable Kerala Model 7 should the efficiency, attained by petroleum, become scarce or limited? What might such oil-texts mirror for Kerala's post-oil cultural futures? In the early 1990s, when Amitav Ghosh coined the term petrofiction in his analysis of Abdelraman Munif's quintet of novels, Cities of Salt, to designate a literary genre that

Download

“Migration, Home and Paradoxical Freedoms: (Re)reading Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic in Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan.”

Cultural Studies: Journal of Literary and Critical Writing 31.1, 31(1), 9-24. ISSN: 0975-6396.

Abstract: My paper seeks to explore how Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan complicates our perceptio... more Abstract: My paper seeks to explore how Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan complicates our perception of power and our understanding of class subjugation apropos internal migration and regional identity in the Kerala-Karnataka border of feudal Dakshina Kannada. In Vidheyan, what occurs when desire for home disturbs and challenges class order is an instance of the paradox of the master-slave relationship, a confrontation between freedom and domination as delineated by G.W. F. Hegel’s dialectic of the Lord and Bondsman.

Download

"A Place Not Our Own: Gulf Emigration and Bordered Lives in Benyamin’s Jasmine Days"

Menon, P. (2021). “A Place Not Our Own: Gulf Emigration and Bordered Lives in Benyamin’s Jasmine Days.” In Jayjit Sarkar (Ed.), Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness (pp. 121-.141). Hanover: Ibidem; Columbia U. P., ISNB: 978-3-83821-462-7, 2020

Like few other literary figures focusing on the Arabian Gulf States in contemporary times, Kerala... more Like few other literary figures focusing on the Arabian Gulf States in contemporary times, Keralan author Benyamin displays in his recently translated prize-winning work, Jasmine Days, the complex paradoxes and discrepancies that characterize the bordered relationships between the native and migrant, the individual and group, literature and politics to further explore the writer-translator dyad. And yet his text offers such direct access to the serious chaos and severe ruptures of these bordered categories as a powerful revolution takes shape in the novel’s unnamed Gulf setting, the City. How does Benyamin manage to unpack the tensions between affiliation and exile, between the individual and the group, between the private and public as giving way to a new politics of reading? Using Benyamin’s Jasmine Days, this paper explores the bordered emigrant lives of different South Asian communities in the Gulf set against the backdrop of the Arab Spring. I argue that this text is a creative attempt at providing a site of interpretation of the human affect that aid in erasing the borders between the native and migrant, the individual and the group, the writer and the translator.

"Transactional or Transnational? Gulf Cities, Guest Workers and Global Universities"

Menon, P. (forthcoming). "Transactional or Transnational? Gulf Cities, Guest Workers and Global Universities". In Debananda Misra & Rodrigo Caimanque (Ed.), Urban and Academic Collaboration in India: Building Relationships between Cities and Universities. Palgrave Macmillan.

In the last two decades, the six-member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, ... more In the last two decades, the six-member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) have attracted some of the major global universities to establish satellite campuses in the region. Most all of these campuses work in urban spaces of the Gulf and employ a good majority of guest workers from neighboring South Asian countries such as India—more specifically from the south Indian state of Kerala. Since gaining citizenship to any of the Gulf countries is not a possibility, guest workers are vulnerable to itinerant anxieties of impermanence. Based on the analysis of three community groups— temporary workers at Gulf universities, international students studying at global universities in the Gulf, and Gulf expatriates contextualized in Keralan universities, I argue that migrants in the gulf face an “anxiety of transience.” How do these universities register the absence-presence of migrant workers in the Gulf States? How do they record immigrant student lives in the socio-political, cultural, and literary fabric of their courses and administrative policies and practices? Also, what role can universities in a top ‘sender’ Indian state like Kerala play to conceive of ethical migratory practices to the Gulf? How can they help to make visible the abject conditions of these euphemistically called guest-workers in the Gulf? This paper will examine the potential role of universities, both in the Gulf and in Kerala, to stimulate social change by engaging in university-led initiatives.

"Cultural Production of Narratives as Counter-Archives in Kerala Gulf Emigration Studies"

Menon, P. (2020). "Cultural Production of Narratives as Counter-Archives in Kerala Gulf Migration Studies". In S. Irudaya Rajan (Ed.), India Migration Report 2020: Kerala Model of Migration Surveys (pp. 319- 335). Routledge., 2020

Recent mass emigration to the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the ... more Recent mass emigration to the Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates has not only allowed for the rapid economic expansion for the Gulf and ‘sender’ countries, but at the same time it has also contributed to various vivid and diverse cultural productions in the arts and humanities. Yet, the current dominant discourse on Gulf diaspora is primarily filtered through the lens of economic labor and its rights. In what ways do the arts and humanities, especially the cultural production of narratives that create sites of interpretation, enhance the policy-oriented, economic and sociological discourse on Gulf emigration? How do they shape a culture of community and citizenship based on an ethic that goes beyond legal status and economic standing?

“Rewriting the Archive: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.”.

In Mélanie Joseph-Vilain & Judith Misrahi-Barak (Ed.), Another Life: Horizons Anglophones (pp. 120-137). Montpellier: Pulm: PoCo Pages. ISBN: 978-2-84269-969-7.

This article examines how Arundhati Roy’s training as an archeologist shapes her narrative and th... more This article examines how Arundhati Roy’s training as an archeologist shapes her narrative and thematic concerns in The God of Small Things as she unearths the oppressive ideologies that circulate within the Kerala society. Roy’s attention to the native hegemons of castism and sexism along with contemporary Kerala’s obsession with colonial values provide a counter-archive to the traditional representation of Kerala as utopic. Roy’s counter-archive successfully recovers the subaltern experiences in Kerala and she establishes the validity of these marginal voices through an aesthetic of the ‘fragment’. Roy’s investigation of the monuments that form the ‘sites of action’ of her protagonists’ personal history, the excavation and display of indigenous lifestyles, and the layered form of her narrative structure help support my claim that Roy’s life and novel offer figures for the archeologist-author’s efforts to probe, unearth and problematize marginal desires.

“I Too Call Myself I: The Non-normative Subject in Kamala Das’s My Story.”

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 93-112. ISSN No. 19481845

Abstract: This paper examines Kamala Das’ subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and caste... more Abstract: This paper examines Kamala Das’ subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and casted normativity in My Story. I examine the ways in which gender is constructed in upper caste Kerala and the resistance of such a construction by Das, who challenges the objectifications and identifications assigned to a typical Nair woman. Kamala Das registers her resistance by writing herself and challenging social definitions by openly retaliating against the hegemonic tools that have kept women in Kerala oppressed. Through a deliberately unreliable autobiographical mode of narration, Das defies the conventional role of a Nair woman by writing about homosexuality, transgressions, and marital infidelity. The resistance Das attains comes from her rejection of the prescribed parent-child relationship she had initially established with her husband and by later relying on her own growth, through which she attains agency that allows her to become a model for women around her. Das offers ethical action as resistance to the immaturity imposed on her by Kerala’s patriarchy.
Keywords: Kerala, Gender, Nair, Autobiography, My Story

Talks by Priya Menon

One on One w/ Dr. Priya Menon: Fulbright Fellowship Interview

Troy TrojanVision , 2018

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the... more The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build relations between the people of the United States and other countries that are needed to solve global challenges. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program is administered by the Council for International Exchange of Scholars.

In her research, Dr. Menon will study and document a counter-archive of the typical success stories of emigration to the Arabian Gulf States disseminated by mainstream media in India. Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, as well as a record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields.

“This is an incredible honor, and I am very excited and humbled to be a part of the illustrious Fulbright alumni,” Dr. Menon said. “There is an exciting and growing body of literary texts, primarily conceived and circulated in southeast Asia, featuring these emigrant workers’ quotidian experiences which often involve exploitation grounded in a neo-colonial model of economic inequality and exclusion. It will be interesting to study whether literature can aid in bringing about social change apropos Arabian Gulf emigration.”

" 'Pravasi Really Means Absence’: Gulf-Pravasis as Spectral Figures in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People"

Download

"Kerala's Own Petrofiction: Literary Interventions in Gulf Migration Studies"

Ala: Kerala Scholars @http://ala.keralascholars.org/issues/23/keralas-own-petrofiction/, 2020

Download

“Migration, Home and Paradoxical Freedoms: (Re)reading Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic in Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Vidheyan.”

Cultural Studies: Journal of Literary and Critical Writing 31.1, 31(1), 9-24. ISSN: 0975-6396.

Download

"A Place Not Our Own: Gulf Emigration and Bordered Lives in Benyamin’s Jasmine Days"

"Transactional or Transnational? Gulf Cities, Guest Workers and Global Universities"

"Cultural Production of Narratives as Counter-Archives in Kerala Gulf Emigration Studies"

“Rewriting the Archive: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.”.

In Mélanie Joseph-Vilain & Judith Misrahi-Barak (Ed.), Another Life: Horizons Anglophones (pp. 120-137). Montpellier: Pulm: PoCo Pages. ISBN: 978-2-84269-969-7.

“I Too Call Myself I: The Non-normative Subject in Kamala Das’s My Story.”

Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 93-112. ISSN No. 19481845

One on One w/ Dr. Priya Menon: Fulbright Fellowship Interview

Troy TrojanVision , 2018

Priya Menon

Uploads

Papers by Priya Menon

Talks by Priya Menon

Log In