Situated against this backdrop, this panel investigates how contemporary global Sri Lankan novelists revisit ethnonationalist and class-nuanced violence in the country’s postcolonial history to interrogate the present crisis by way of what Achille Mbembe calls “a reverse reading of our present.” Amidst the decay and ruins of democracy, their work functions as “alternative nonhegemonic sites for justice by way of heterotopic negotiations” (Schlund-Vials). They transform the death worlds of necropolitical into life-giving forces through everyday acts of resistance, community, memory, and resilience, asking us to reconsider the function of aesthetics/storytelling amidst the sorrows of the current Sri Lankan crisis.
The panel opens with Maryse Jayasuriya’s paper, “State Violence, Militancy, Martyrdom: The Ideologies of Death in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night,” which examines the importance of reckoning with Sri Lanka’s recent past by bearing witness to disappearances and human rights violations. It explores how Ganeshananthan’s novel depicts the daily decisions of those living in the midst of violence and war—whether to speak out and risk one’s life and those of loved ones or to silence oneself in order to survive and make sacrifices as a means to an end. The novel traces how decay can set in within movements when they succumb to bad faith and adopt undemocratic principles, including a fetishization of death as martyrdom. The paper thus argues that Brotherless Night constitutes a nuanced exploration of state violence, resistance to the state, and the corrupting effects of violence and the glorification of sacrifice on both state forces and the militants who oppose the state.
Continuing on this thread, Pavithra Tantrigoda’s paper “Eco-poetics of Resilience in the Novels of Sivanandan and Arasanayagam” focuses on how once fecund and life-sustaining natural environments have become deathscapes—sites of decay, violence and death for Tamil communities in the milieu of ethnic conflict in the post-1980s Sri Lanka. Drawing on the works of Giorgio Agamben (bare life and states of exception), Achille Mbembe (Necropolitics), it theorizes the complex intersection of sovereign violence and environmental decay in the contexts of war, militarism, and legal exceptions. It attends to the way in which Tamil communities defy death-worlds that they are made to inhabit by transforming these ruined eco-scapes into life-giving forms through labor and love.
The third paper, “The Différend and Postcolonial Postmemories in Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida'' by Dinidu Karunanayake, investigates how Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker-winning novel presents a searing critique of Sri Lanka’s necropolitical Reign of Terror (bheeshana yugaya) of the 1980s. Where the dead account for silences “imposed on knowledge,” Karunatilaka critically attends to Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “différend”—“a damage accompanied by the loss of means to prove the damage.” He thus presents a testimonial that imaginatively reconstitutes the missing, disappeared, erased and non-existent wrongs in the official record of a warped democracy. The paper applies Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory” to theorize Karunatilaka’s prognosis of the afterlife of Sri Lanka’s decolonization. While invoking postmemories of slain human rights activists, the novel renders legible necropolitical violence (Mbembe) overshadowed by global collisions of the trans-Asian military industry and the U.S. security state.
Finally, the panel’s discussant Nalini Iyer will deliberate on the papers, focusing on the significance of these recent Sri Lankan novels for South Asian literary studies and postcolonial studies.
This panel, in this fashion, reads the recent Anglophone novels emerging from Sri Lanka as retrospective examinations of a fraught socio-political past that haunts the present. In doing so, global Sri Lankan writers engage in ethical acts of bearing witness to the state violence against minorities, resisting the silencing, censorship, and public amnesia since the civil war’s conclusion in 2009. This panel situates these novels as “enabling fictions” (Slaughter) that envisage transformational politics and poetics amidst ruins of democracy. By focusing on how the global Sri Lankan novel celebrates resilience within the communities and literature, the panel attends to the Presidential Theme: “Celebration: Joy and Sorrow.”