Global Sri Lankan Literature and Culture

This book recognizes and celebrates the emerging trends and new orientations of global Sri Lankan literature and culture in response to the island's complex postcolonial and postwar realities. While postcolonial politics continue to condition the lived experiences of present-day Sri Lankans both on the island and in the diaspora, they have become even more entangled in regional and global geopolitics. Even after the twenty-six-year civil war officially ended in 2009, Sri Lanka did not see a much-anticipated return to peace and democratic rule of law, as new ethno-religious tensions have augmented existing fissures in the postwar era. However, Sri Lankans continue to resist being trapped within a continuum of violence as abject victims.

Set against this backdrop, the volume brings together articles that investigate how writers, filmmakers, and artists form the frontlines of such dissent. While writers residing in Sri Lanka experiment with new forms of expression, diasporic writers have brought in new dimensions of lived experience split across transnational, transhistorical, and transgenerational borders. By dismantling officially sanctioned narratives, they have compiled alternative testimonials, decried state terrorism, and made available subversive channels of criticism to imagine a more just society.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars in postcolonial studies, South Asian literature, cultural studies, diaspora studies, and conflict and peace studies. It will also appeal to readers interested in contemporary Sri Lankan politics, creative resistance, and transnational cultural production.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

Maryse Jayasuriya is Professor of English at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (2012), the editor of The Immigrant Experience: Critical Insights (2018), and guest-editor of Special Issues of South Asian Review on Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature.

Dinidu Karunanayake is Associate Professor of English at Elon University in North Carolina, USA, where he researches and teaches twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone postcolonial literature and Asian American literature. His work has appeared in numerous venues including Journal of Postcolonial Writing and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.