The symbolic survival of the “living dead”: Narrating the LTTE female fighter in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 384-398
Author(s):  
Birte Heidemann
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Post War ◽  
Literary Portrait ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Female Fighters ◽  
The Military ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article examines the lingering presence of the female militant figure in post-war Sri Lankan women’s writing in English. Through a careful demarcation of the formal–aesthetic limits of engaging with the country’s competing ethno-nationalisms, the article seeks to uncover the gendered hierarchies of Sri Lanka’s civil war in two literary works: Niromi de Soyza’s autobiography Tamil Tigress (2011) and Nayomi Munaweera’s debut novel Island of a Thousand Mirrors (2012). The reading draws attention to the writers’ attempt to “historise” the LTTE female fighter and/or suicide bomber within Sri Lanka’s complex colonial past and its implications for the recent history of conflict. The individual motives of the female fighters to join the LTTE, the article contends, remain ideologically susceptible to, if not interpellated by, the gendered hierarchies both within the military movement and Tamil society at large. A literary portrait of such entangled hierarchies in post-war Sri Lankan texts, the article reveals, helps expose the hegemonic (male) discourses of Sri Lankan nationalism that tend to undermine the war experiences of women.

scholarly journals Spectres of M.I.A

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeyapriya Foster
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Independent State ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Close Textual Analysis ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
Truth Claims ◽  
Missing In Action ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Military

<p><b>M.I.A, born Mathangi Arulpragasam, is a British Sri Lankan Tamil artist-activist whose acronymised stage persona refers to the military term Missing in Action. Set against hegemonic readings which privilege postcolonial, feminist, or transnational categories of analyses, my original contribution to knowledge is to locate M.I.A’s work in the political contexts in which they are produced. I thereby foreground the hidden Tamil erasures of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009) that traverse the artist’s productions. The historicisation of M.I.A’s politics of haunting is not only a research gap, but central in understanding the artist’s texts. Using hauntology as a framework and close textual analysis as a method, this thesis constitutes a Tamil-centric reading of M.I.A’s work as well as a nuanced contribution to hauntology studies. </b></p><p>My study identifies the Tamil cemeteries evoked in four songs—“Galang” (2003), “Bucky Done Gun” (2004), “Born Free” (2010), and “Borders” (2015)—inquiring into their visual translations, functions, objectives, and larger political significance. I particularly focus on their visual language that emerge from the collective absence-presences of the war, shared by the Tamil diaspora, of which the artist and I are part. My analyses also extend to probing salient aspects of the lyrics, performance, sound- and sartorial politics. </p><p>My textual analyses render the following findings: M.I.A’s productions recirculate histories of Tamil erasure as sites of death. They replicate and extend the funerary work of the cemeteries of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—a Sri Lankan Tamil nationalist, separatist, and militant organisation that fought for an independent state in the north and north east of Sri Lanka. The artist recartographises Tamil cemeteries into ubiquitous popcultural expressions, in which the aesthetic techniques—animated stencils, flags, murals, photo montages, and performative bodies—visibilise and physicalise the materiality of violence enacted upon Tamils. M.I.A’s topographies of death rematerialise the architecture of cemeteries as inconspicuous yet omnipresent sites of absence, marking a simultaneous obscuration and ubiquitisation of cemeterial landscapes. These memory locales tend to Tamil graves, expose Tamil truth claims, and let the dead speak with and through the depiction of their brutalised bodies. Urging a responsibility for the (living) dead, they challenge the state’s control over ontology and visibility that renders Tamil lives unlivable and absent.</p>

Battered but bold: Sri Lankan Tamil refugee war experiences, camp challenges and resilience

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Miriam Kuttikat ◽  
Anita Vaillancourt ◽  
Michael Massey
Keyword(s):  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Psychosocial Interventions ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Positive Adaptation ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
And Migration ◽  
Will Power ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Migration Experiences

Purpose The civil war prompted many Tamils to flee Sri Lanka as refugees. Several researchers have documented psychological distress and trauma among Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, but the literature lacks sufficient discussion of resilience among this population. Although Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have experienced conflict and loss, they have also demonstrated positive adaptation following these challenges. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The present study used an ecological approach, in which the effect of the environment on a person is regarded as significant, to explore resilience among Sri Lankan Tamils living in refugee camps in India. Findings Through a qualitative investigation of refugee experiences of war and camp life, the authors developed a conceptual framework for understanding individual and collective resilience among refugees. Research limitations/implications Additionally, the results of this study need to be interpreted with caution because participants were camp refugees, which may limit the applicability of these results with refugees who live in different settings. Practical implications The current research results show that intervention programs should have multiple components, including trauma intervention to address the individual and community psychological and psychiatric effects of war and migration experiences and psychosocial interventions to address individual, family, community dynamics and daily stressors. Social implications The study participants stated that Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are using their resilience traits including will power, positive talk, practical solutions, social support, religion and social networks to remake their broken souls. Originality/value Future studies need to be conducted with other refugee group to validate the findings of the paper.

HerStory (2007): Falling with Hong Kong in women’s writing and dance

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xuefei Ma
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Potential Field ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Modern Dance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Women’S Writing

This article analyses Hong Kong-based choreographer Helen Lai’s work HerStory (2007) in the context of Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 and its impact on modern dance and women’s writing. I examine HerStory’s innovation of a gesture – falling – in multiple registers and argue that the gesture of falling enacts a potential field to articulate the unspeakable, unrecognizable bodily experience. I show the ways HerStory, through falling, undid the boundaries of the rural and urban space, the past and the present, the individual and the collective; and expressed the tensions between women’s corporeal experience and gendered social inscriptions. In the end, I discuss why revisiting these relations can help us better understand Hong Kong’s historical moment.

Post-War Jewish Women's Writing in French

2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-38
Author(s):  
Lucille Cairns
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Post War ◽  
Women’S Writing

Post-War Women's Writing in German: Feminist Critical Approaches

2000 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 577
Author(s):  
Brigid Haines ◽  
Chris Weedon
Keyword(s):  
Women's Writing ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Post War ◽  
Women’S Writing

Writing, Reception, Intertextuality

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-180
Author(s):  
Sarah Connell ◽  
Julia Flanders
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Text Book ◽  
Large Scale Data ◽  
Digital Spectrum ◽  
Digital Methods ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Women’S Writing

Reading has received renewed scrutiny in the digital age, a result of the defamiliarization of the medium that has also brought about a rethinking of what is meant by “text,” “book,” and “author.” Fascination with large-scale data analysis has shifted attention toward modes of reading that sample the source to produce a statistical artifact from which we can in turn read clusterings of words, shifts in topic or register, or changing orthographic habits. These remote reading practices, however, fail to capitalize on valuable modeling of the individual text, but more recently researchers have been exploring ways of bringing these two ends of the digital spectrum into closer conversation. This article explores the study of readership and reception of pre-Victorian women’s writing through these emerging digital methods, examining two collections (Women Writers Online and Women Writers in Review) related to early women’s writing with large-scale analytical methods that engage with the detailed textual models in these collections’ metadata and markup.

scholarly journals Polskie pisarstwo kobiet w wieku XX – projekt syntezy

2012 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Ewa Kraskowska
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Polish Literature ◽  
History Of ◽  
Methodological Problems ◽  
State Of Research ◽  
Post War ◽  
Condition Of Women ◽  
Women’S Writing

Summary This article deals with the methodological problems involved in constructing a history of women’s writing. It also presents an outline history of women’s writing in Poland and a review of the state of research in that field. Although women’s writing is an integral part of Polish literature, the author argues that its development is influenced by specific factors which determine the cultural and social condition of women in a given historical time. Consequently, the periodization of women’s writing should take into account criteria and divisions which do not always coincide with the customary reference points of the mainstream literary history. The author also compiles a list of some specific problems of the historiography of Polish women’s writing which require more focused attention on the part of researchers, ie. the phenomenon of the second-rank female writer, subgenres of women’s writing, and the work of female writers from the interwar period, who continued to write in the post-war Poland.

scholarly journals Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration of Armed Groups in Post-war Sri Lanka: A Study based on Koralaipattu South Divisional Secretariat Division in Eastern Sri Lanka

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 236
Author(s):  
V. Kamalasiri ◽  
M. A. M. Fowsar ◽  
M. M. Fazil
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Armed Groups ◽  
Regional Institutions ◽  
Sustainable Peace ◽  
Foreign Governments ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Military Victory ◽  
The Military

This article generally focuses on the process of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) which are essential to restore sustainable peace in the post-war scenario. The DDR is one of the significant aspects of the process of post-war peacebuilding. In most of the cases, this process has implemented with the assistance of foreign governments and international or regional institutions. However, the circumstances under which the Government of Sri Lanka happened to take over the sole responsibility for implementing the DDR process have raised serious concerns both at the local and international level. Hence, this article attempts to conduct a detailed inquiry of the DDR process implemented in Sri Lanka after the end of the civil war. This article followed a descriptive method of investigation. The findings of the study show that the DDR process was not fully implemented in a broad manner in the Sri Lankan context, but only served as a continuation of the military victory over the LTTE. In particular, not much attention was paid to disarming and demobilizing the armed groups, and only the so-called DDR process took place without international assistance and supervision.

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