The irony of kinship migration and the control of emotions among Malayalis

Abstract

The article analyses migrants' uses of irony in relation to normative conceptions of intergenerational affection, in Kerala (South India) and in the diaspora. It draws from current understanding of irony not only as a figure of speech but also as an emotionally-charged attitude of scorn and dissatisfaction towards a dominant view of society. The ethnography shows how irony emerges in context where present forms of mobility are set against a past of painful kinship ruptures, and aims at creating a distance between the subject and the emotional charge of the stories recalled. It suggests how the sociological understanding of emotions within processes of contemporary migration should go beyond the 'here and now' of research contexts, to interrogate the relevance of longer family histories. It also argues for the need to look beyond the dominant trope of nostalgia to look at how migrants' emotions towards kin might be moulded by recurrent – and often unresolved – ambivalence. Irony emerges as an important affective frame through which migrants express – and importantly try to control – conflicting emotions as displaced subjects. It constitutes an emotional work through which migrants make sense of events over which they do not feel they have total control, and yet with the intention of asserting their own truth about the parodies and paradoxes of family lives.