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jhani randhawa (they/them)

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rivulet
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jhani randhawa
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Long form research

Archival documents in the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Personal journal notes after a day in the National Archives. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Documents from the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Family photo album 1963–1985. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Archives pulled for research at the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Mombasa, Kenya colonial map. National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. African and Asian Reading Room at the British Library in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. Archival documents in the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa. British Library in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.
I am researching colonial dictations of racial and gender formations mediated through ecology and farm labor in the Indian Ocean circuit from the late 1800s–1980s as part of a larger hybrid project on queer ancestors, anti-colonial solidarity movements, pre-colonial migration and spiritualities, and archival practices. From this research so many threads appear: speculation and erasure in archival marginalia, sport and leisure among militarized colonial subjects, industrialized sugarcane experiments, labor and land laws, Black and Asian solidarities, novel gender expressions, non-human animal husbandry, medical/biological policing, millenarian rebellions, climate crises and famine, caste-race-gender-class-delineated “Love Laws,” anti-colonial independence movements, and more.

This research blossomed from my own family’s experience and mobility from indenture to land-ownership as colonial subjects in India and Kenya, and later the U.K. and the American South.

Currently, this research is building the bedrock of material upon which I am writing a book-length collection of autofictions. You can read sample excerpts in the publications O BOD, rivulet, and forthcoming in 128 Lit. I will also weave this research into my graduate study at the University of London.

Fragments


While I was in residence at Writers House Pittsburgh (2022), an accidental new writing emerged. Taking notes and fragments of writing from 2015–2016 and braiding them together with an ongoing reading practice/study of ice as a trope in Romantic-era poetry and colonial medical travelogues, I began working on a loose project. Its themes are leisure, anti-police protest, years preceding a change in pronouns, love as a practice, trans*oceanic solidarity. In this project, Dr. Frankenstein’s glorious Creature is introduced, as are the theorists Mbembe and Levinas. In this project, tsunami could be the Shelley-esque icefloe, what precedes it, what emerges after a warming of the sea of ethics.

You can read a sampling in the Poetry Project’s Footnotes. 

More to come...


Chapbooks, essay, micro-fictions, and photo collections are in the works :)


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