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Go to today"Collective trauma, historical memories and the refashioning of national narratives: responses of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora to the defeat of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam" by Mark Whitaker, University of South Carolina |
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| On May 17, 2009 Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, a member of his country’s Sinhalese ethnic majority, announced the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the fierce Tamil separatist army that had been fighting the government since 1978 to establish an independent Tamil homeland or eeLam. The victory was a bloody one -- conservative UN estimates put the number of civilian Tamil deaths at 20,000-- and the aftermath remains dicey, with at least 300,000 Tamil non-combatants held in bleak, barb wired, increasingly pestilential ‘welfare villages’, their fate largely hidden from international view by government bans on NGO and press contact. In any case, this announcement of victory, though greeted with great public jubilation by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese community, was felt as a crushing blow by Sri Lankan Tamils, including many Sri Lankan Tamils in Diaspora in Asia, Europe, Australia and North America. Their common problem: to imagine some future for the Sri Lankan Tamil community, both at home and abroad, in the absence of the LTTE and the mixture of hope and protection most believed it offered (however problematically) against anti-Tamil violence and cultural genocide. Mark Whitaker has been conducting research with Sri Lankan Tamils since 1981, and his work has followed many of his old friends, colleagues and informants into exile in Europe and North America. In this paper, based on interviews conducted in Toronto, Atlanta and London, Mark Whitaker will discuss the current struggle within the Tamil Diaspora to envision a new future for their community in the face of this raw historical event. More theoretically, he will try to show how the people he talked to used an array of available, variously constructed, historical memories – some rooted in Sri Lanka’s landscape and its past tragedies, some forged in Diaspora and within its media saturated civic spaces -- to come to grips with their collective trauma |
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| Date | November 16, 2009 |
| Time | 12:15PM |
| Location | G08 Uris Hall |
| Speakers |
Mark Whitaker
(University of South Carolina ) Notes: Mark Whitaker is a Professor of Anthropology, and holds a Chair in Social and Behavioral Science, at the University of South Carolina, Aiken; he is also an adjunct Professor of Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. He is the author of Learning Politics from Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka (London: Pluto Press. 2007), and Amiable Incoherence: Manipulating Histories and Modernities in a Batticaloa Hindu Temple (Sri Lankan Studies Series. Amsterdam: VU University Press. 1999). His work focuses on politics, religion, nationalism, journalism, biography, and new media technologies among Tamils in Sri Lanka and in their Diaspora. |
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For more information on this event contact: Durga Bor 607 255 8493 nsj1@cornell.edu |
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