Long form research
![Archival documents in the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/83a26552f2763f4deea682874b4a5a8cf6dbce6d671b0bc511eb4d17d7cf555d/20211019_142612.jpg)
![National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b8ac0d4f2e5f67d074c130399f11b14c5c8bd68541ed19506680c5cda8081bf/20211015_113203.jpg)
![Personal journal notes after a day in the National Archives. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e7d0f1f3ae32ae778d0e55cce703110307d1ba317ddc0f6a3169bd029e5c61e0/20211017_223747.jpg)
![Documents from the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0a6ed3899d914178c02aa1151dccfe1b5f535129bc9e5dc8c013da43682cb3ab/20211029_131133.jpg)
![Family photo album 1963–1985. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/407791a377ae31824aeb67a1cf0f8dd23ff67b149f6af271958095e82008146b/20211030_154720.jpg)
![Archives pulled for research at the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d3c197a9152c9fc0cb7ebb3e87ca1ccb1baf4a0b9cab165919d889d15431ecc/20211029_112206.jpg)
![Mombasa, Kenya colonial map. National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6f2eee753577c8c915d32bf3e64c7f91276f4cd0d47c7232b108791a9c0dec74/20211020_121636.jpg)
![African and Asian Reading Room at the British Library in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5f929404d16e5dbeb883e1b2faad3bd8b5dc7688a25be6d8b2f32d5195c46f1e/20211018_165049.jpg)
![Archival documents in the National Archives in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/953afb871a96cf7344150db536d79ebb790583ddef0ed35b9bc10ebf41fbbcc0/20211015_141340.jpg)
![British Library in London. Photo by Jhani Randhawa.](https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8ce178c0d62b5bc8ac24ca373d58338493785e4128697aa350a81587b163f358/20211018_145813.jpg)
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 in 128 Lit. I will also weave this research into my graduate study at SOAS, 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 :)