The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.
ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Migration and Society
Volume 9 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2024.1450773
This article is part of the Research Topic Mobilities, Migration, and Digital Humanities View all articles
Digital Migration Infrastructure in return-writing: Visualizing the migration landscape of India
Provisionally accepted- Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore, India
Digitization has carved out the migration patterns of immigrants over the recent years of increased technological interventions in human mobility. Migration infrastructures, which typically refer to the physical, commercial, humanitarian, and governmental modes of operation, are multidimensional in nature. Digital infrastructures are equally important to the physical ones as digital technologies facilitate these migration processes through agents like hardware, software, and mediating actors. Amongst the multiple forms of migration, the concept of return-writing and nostalgia-struck-returnees encompass individuals whose life trajectories run parallel to the homeland. The narrative of return to the homeland emerges as a dominant motif in literature due to the rising trends of globalization, the writers' reflection on their own migrant experiences, and publishing trends meeting the demand of the global book market. The objective is to assess the role of digital migration infrastructures in return migrations to India through a close reading of the selected texts and review of postcolonial literary theories by using conditional operation in Python. The study here explores the varied nuances of return migration with a primary focus on the external conditions of travel in migration literature. The paper aims to analyze the genre of return-writing in Indian English literature, through three novels over a period of two decades, i.e. from 2000-2023. The selected texts, beginning with Amit Chaudhari's A New World (2000), Gun Island (2019) by Amitav Ghosh, and Devika Rege's novel Quarterlife (2023), offer a panoramic view of return migration. These novels are extensive in the time period of technological interventions and in depiction of return migration. The Python code examines the extent of existence of a set of digital migration infrastructure keywords by analyzing the content of the novels and creates bar plots and charts to offer a visual representation of the classification results.
Keywords: Digital, infrastructure, Migration, return, Homeland, Refugee, Conditional operation, ICT
Received: 18 Jun 2024; Accepted: 30 Aug 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Mukherjee and Menon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Preetha Mukherjee, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, Indore, India
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.