Inderpal Grewal’s notion of “transnational connectivities” illustrates how “America” serves as an ideological apparatus producing new discourses and practices of freedom. Thinking alongside Grewal, this panel examines the slippage between British decolonization and U.S. neoliberalism that is definitive of this understudied genre of global Sri Lankan writing. Speaking of the resurgence of the once nationally-grounded political novel, Caren Irr identifies “the geopolitical novel” as a new genre of U.S. fiction that dismantles isolationist myths, recalibrates national narratives, and relays global connections. Putting Irr in conversation with Grewal, the panel articulates how the Sri Lankan geopolitical novel envisions a just future in protest at the present intolerable postcolonial living conditions.
The panel opens with Nimanthi Rajasingham’s paper, “Giniralla Conspiracy, Sri Lanka and the Neoliberal University,” which examines the neoliberal underpinnings as encapsulated in the Sri Lankan university through a reading of Nihal de Silva’s novel Giniralla Conspiracy (2005). Whereas the idealized model of the public university in Sri Lanka promises the rural student upward mobility and knowledge through access to free education, the reality of university education is far more complicated. Sri Lankan universities have enforced the exclusion of minority students, experienced shutdowns during violent insurrections and ethno-nationalist conflicts, and allowed students to face intense hazing, as experienced by the female protagonist of de Silva’s novel. Furthermore, a series of neoliberal restructuring of education toward privatization, the effects of globalization, and Sri Lankan debt have made public education increasingly impossible. Using de Silva’s novel as a touchstone, Rajasingham proposes to think of the longer histories of university education that have created the neoliberal university of the present.
Continuing on this thread, Maryse Jayasuriya’s paper “Work on the Margins: Sharon Bala’s The Boat People and Bodies in Transition” examines the intersections of class, ethnicity, and postwar survival. Sharon Bala’s novel The Boat People (2018), set in the Sri Lankan Canadian context, focuses on people who face ethnic chauvinism, structural racism, and collective trauma at home and abroad. The novel examines the plight of Tamil Sri Lankan asylum-seekers whom the Canadian government suspects to have ties with terrorism. Their plight is juxtaposed with the experience of earlier diasporic subjects such as Japanese Canadians who were interned during World War II. As a global diasporic novel that brings together two countries that are often overlooked in favor of more prominent neighbors, Jayasuriya asserts, The Boat People provides compelling evidence of why the work of acknowledging non-US literatures in North America and non-Indian literatures in South Asia is crucial to our scholarship, teaching, and public-facing work.
The third paper, “Shyam Selvadurai’s Mapping of Queer Memory as Postmemory” by Dinidu Karunanayake, examines global formations of memory in the work of Canadian Sri Lankan writer Shyam Selvadurai. Through a reading of Selvadurai’s novels Funny Boy (1994), Cinnamon Gardens (1999), and The Hungry Ghosts (2013), the panelist investigates the politics of queer becoming that unsettle heteronormative nationalism at home and model Asian American assimilation myths in the diaspora. The paper argues how Selvadurai’s oeuvre dreams of a space that can be situated in what José Esbetan Muñoz calls a “queer utopia” that exists exterior to heteronormative postcolonial memory and precarious contemporary living conditions. Karunanayake couples Muñoz’s framing with Marianne Hirsch’s formulation of “postmemory” and argues that Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory fills the gaps of the heteropatriarchal nationalist consciousness, thus presenting a postmemory of postcolonial Sri Lanka.
Finally, the panel’s respondent Sonali Perera will deliver remarks on the three papers. She will reflect on both the limits and openings of geopolitical as a category in relationship to other frameworks. Central to her comments will be a consideration of questions of labor, culture, and neoliberalism. Thinking with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s mapping of “Other Asias,” she will address the disparate yet aligned efforts by the authors under discussion in imagining “alternative nonhegemonic sites for justice” (Schlund-Vials) on behalf of subjects excluded from the dominant narratives of the postcolonial/neoliberal nation and its diaspora. Thus, this panel makes a worthy contribution to the 2023 presidential theme “Working Conditions.”