The Incomplete Thombu

The Incomplete Thombu PDF Author: Sanathanan
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: 9780955667459
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An art project on Tamil life in Sri Lanka during the Civil War.

The Incomplete Thombu

The Incomplete Thombu PDF Author: Sanathanan
Publisher: Anchor Books
ISBN: 9780955667459
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
An art project on Tamil life in Sri Lanka during the Civil War.

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times PDF Author: Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810140764
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.

Archiving Sovereignty

Archiving Sovereignty PDF Author: Stewart Motha
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047212398X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Archiving Sovereignty shows how courts use fiction in their treatment of sovereign violence. Law's complicity with imperial and neocolonial practices occurs when courts inscribe and repeat the fabulous tales that provide an alibi for archaic sovereign acts that persist in the present. The United Kingdom's depopulation of islands in the Indian Ocean to serve the United States' neoimperial interests, Australia's exile and abandonment of refugees on remote islands, the failure to acknowledge genocidal acts or colonial dispossession, and the memorial work of the South African Constitution after apartheid are all sustained by historical fictions. This history-work of law constitutes an archive where sovereign violence is mediated, dissimulated, and sustained. Stewart Motha extends the concept of the "archive," as site of origin and source of authority, to signifying what law does in preserving and disavowing the past at the same time. Sovereignty is often cast as a limit-concept, constituent force, determining the boundary of law. Archiving Sovereignty reverses this to explain how judicial pronouncements inscribe and sustain extravagant claims to exceptionality and sovereign solitude. This wide-ranging, critical work distinguishes between myths that sustain neocolonial orders and fictions that generate new forms of political and ethical life.

The Herald

The Herald PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Pakistan
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Un/Bound

Un/Bound PDF Author: Megan Brown
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040118895
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Life writing often explores the profound impact of border crossings, both physical and metaphorical. Writers navigate personal and cultural boundaries, reflecting on identity, belonging, and the transformative power of crossing thresholds. These narratives unveil the complexities of migration, immigration, or internal journeys, offering intimate perspectives on adapting to new environments or confronting internal conflicts. Un/Bound is a collection of essays about such narratives, with an emphasis on mobility and border metaphors, the ethical dimensions of cross-border storytelling, and questions of access, translation, and circulation. Scholarly interest in borders, mobility, and related topics has greatly intensified in the context of public health emergencies and recent conflicts in international relations. The chapters in this book contribute to this dialogue by exploring internal and external, and physical and abstract borders and divisions. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, translation studies and political philosophy. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement

Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement PDF Author: Katrina M. Powell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317539036
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
In this book, Powell examines the ways that identities are constructed in displacement narratives based on cases of eminent domain, natural disaster, and civil unrest, attending specifically to the rhetorical strategies employed as barriers and boundaries intersect with individual lives. She provides a unique method to understand how the displaced move within accepted and subversive discourses, and how representation is a crucial component of that movement. In addition, Powell shows how notions of human rights and the "public good" are often at odds with individual well-being and result in intriguing intersections between discourses of power and discourses of identity. Given the ever-increasing numbers of displaced persons across the globe, and the "layers of displacement" experienced by many, this study sheds light on the resources of rhetoric as means of survival and resistance during the globally common experience of displacement.

The Dynamics of Conflict and Peace in Contemporary South Asia

The Dynamics of Conflict and Peace in Contemporary South Asia PDF Author: Minoru Mio
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000331369
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
This book engages with the concept, true value, and function of democracy in South Asia against the background of real social conditions for the promotion of peaceful development in the region. In the book, the issue of peaceful social development is defined as the conditions under which the maintenance of social order and social development is achieved – not by violent compulsion but through the negotiation of intentions or interests among members of society. The book assesses the issue of peaceful social development and demonstrates that the maintenance of such conditions for long periods is a necessary requirement for the political, economic, and cultural development of a society and state. Chapters argue that, through the post-colonial historical trajectory of South Asia, it has become commonly understood that democracy is the better, if not the best, political system and value for that purpose. Additionally, the book claims that, while democratization and the deepening of democracy have been broadly discussed in the region, the peace that democracy is supposed to promote has been in serious danger, especially in the 21st century. A timely survey and re-evaluation of democracy and peaceful development in South Asia, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of South Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies and Asian Politics and Security.

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka PDF Author: Anoma Pieris
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351246321
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Analyses of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) overwhelmingly represent it as an ethnonationalist contest, prolonging postcolonial arguments on the creation and dissolution of the incipient nation-state since independence in 1948. While colonial divide-and-rule policies, the rise of ethnonationalist lobbies, structural discrimination and majoritarian democracy have been established as grounds for inter-ethnic hostility, there are other significant transformative forces that remain largely unacknowledged in postcolonial analyses. This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways. Based around three themes – normative spaces, human mobilities and exilic states – it is organised into ten comprehensive, chapter-based explorations of a range of spatial units, including homes, cities, routes, camps and experiences of ruin that were irrevocably politicised by protracted conflict. Focusing on their material transformations over a thirty-seven-year period, the book explores what can be known of the war if we look beyond ethnicity to other salient, shared geographical features of this embattled history. The book uncovers how fealty to exclusionary cultures of political sovereignty aligns us with their violence, limiting our capacity for empathy, a boundary seemingly exacerbated by neoliberal opportunities. Making use of Sri Lanka as a case study to test geographic, architectural and urban methodologies for understanding violence, this book acts as a provocation to rethink current readings of the particular case study while reflecting on the more general impact of marketisation and militarisation in Asia. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including those scholars interested in South Asian history, politics and civil war, South Asian studies, border studies, geography and architecture and urban studies.

Asian Cinema and the Use of Space

Asian Cinema and the Use of Space PDF Author: Lilian Chee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134629605
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Asian cinemas are connected to global networks and participate in producing international film history while at the same time influenced and engaged by spatial, cultural, social and political transformations. This interdisciplinary study forwards a productive pairing of Asian cinemas and space, where space is used as a discursive tool to understand cinemas of Asia. Concentrating on the performative potential of cinematic space in Asian films, the contributors discuss how space (re)constructs forms of identities and meanings across a range of cinematic practices. Cities, landscapes, buildings and interiors actively shape cinematic performances of such identities and their significances. The essays are structured around the spatial themes of ephemeral, imagined and contested spaces. They deal with struggles for identity, belonging, autonomy and mobility within different national and transnational contexts across East, Southeast and parts of South Asia in particular, which are complicated by micropolitics and subcultures, and by the interventions and interests of global lobbies.

This Divided Island

This Divided Island PDF Author: Samanth Subramanian
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466878746
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Samanth Subramanian has written about politics, culture, and history for the New York Times and the New Yorker. Now, Subramanian takes on a complex topic that touched millions of lives in This Divided Island. In the summer of 2009, the leader of the dreaded Tamil Tiger guerrillas was killed, bringing to an end the civil war in Sri Lanka. For nearly thirty years, the war's fingers had reached everywhere, leaving few places, and fewer people, untouched. What happens to the texture of life in a country that endures such bitter conflict? What happens to the country's soul? Subramanian gives us an extraordinary account of the Sri Lankan war and the lives it changed. Taking us to the ghosts of summers past, he tells the story of Sri Lanka today. Through travels and conversations, he examines how people reconcile themselves to violence, how the powerful become cruel, and how victory can be put to the task of reshaping memory and burying histories.