Fugitive Archives: Critical Fabulation in Shailja Patel’s Migritude

• In Event: Radical Repositories: Archives, Artists, and Political Potentiality

Abstract

In this paper, I show how Shailja Patel’s Migritude fractures the sanitized history of Kenyan independence. She refashions a normative gift – a trousseau of saris, which she uses as props – into an interwoven and multivalent movement narrative that juxtaposes the colonial archive with her family’s story as well as Kikuyu and Maasai women’s oral testimonies of sexual violences they endured in British concentration camps. This feminist materialist method with its abolitionist impulses counters the abuses of the British colonial and Kenyan postcolonial states and functions in a reparative mode for Kenya’s indigenous communities and its South Asian diaspora.

Presenter

• Neelofer Qadir, University of Massachusetts Amherst