Terror, Trauma, Transitions: Representing Violence in Sri Lankan Literature

Authors

  • Maryse Jayasuriya University of Texas at El Paso

Abstract

Because of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long ethnic conflict between the Sri Lankan government and militant groups like the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the comparatively brief but bloody conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), violence has occupied an important place in contemporary Sri Lankan literature. This essay surveys the role of violence in contemporary Sri Lanka literature in English, Tamil, and Sinhala, considering the ways in which literature bears witness to violence, mourns violence, protests violence, and calls for and models dialogue and reconciliation.

Keywords

violence, terrorism, war, memory, Sri Lanka, ethnicity, literature, reconciliation

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Author Biography

Maryse Jayasuriya, University of Texas at El Paso

Maryse Jayasuriya is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Texas at El Paso. She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University. She is the author of Terror and Reconciliation: Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature, 1983-2009 (Lexington, 2012), which explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long ethnic conflict. She has published articles on South Asian and Asian-American literature in such venues as South Asian Review, Journeys, Margins, and The Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies. She co-edited a Special Issue of South Asian Review (33.3) entitled Sri Lankan Anglophone Literature.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/indialogs.48

Published

2016-04-16

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