Photograph by Darshana Mini. Entrance to “Ente Veedu, My Home: Malayalees in Singapore” Exhibition. Indian Heritage Center, Singapore. June 12, 2024.
UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity fellow (2024-2025)
Sembawang’s Malayali Settlement: Fiction, Memoirs and Literature as Inter-Asian Method
In this paper, I locate the longer histories of migration of Indian indentured labor to Malaya and Strait settlements through an analysis of Kamaladevi Aravindan’s
Sembawang: A Novel (2020). Looking at events around the British naval base,
Sembawang sheds light on subregional sentiments over linguistic and cultural uprooting, while attempting to respond to questions of belongingness and assimilation. What do such works, and the historical contexts they deal with tell us about the ways the undercurrents of inter-Asia formations were scaffolded into the discussions on regional identities in estate labor? Further, how might such works supplement our understanding of migrant histories as they remerge in the contemporary moment of a Singaporean-Malayali diasporic memory boom?
Darshana Sreedhar Mini is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of
Rated A: Soft-Porn Cinema and Mediations of Desire in India (UC press, 2024) and co-editor of
South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and Obscene (Routledge, 2024). She is currently working on her book titled
Telegeographies of Indian Migration: Media as Transregional Homemaking. Her research interests broadly include South Asian Cinema, Feminist Media, Global Media Cultures and Migrant media. Her work has been published in
Feminist Media Histories,
Communication, Culture & Critique, Film History,
Porn Studies,
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies,
South Asian Popular Culture and
South Asian Film & Media.
*Events currently open only to 2024-25 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*
