Publication date:
29 March 2012Length of book:
194 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksDimensions:
240x160mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780739165782
Terror and Reconciliation explores the English language literature that has emerged from Sri Lanka’s quarter-century long ethnic conflict. It examines poetry, short fiction and novels by both diasporic writers and writers resident in Sri Lanka. Its discussion of resident Sri Lankan writers is particularly important because it calls attention to a rich and ambitious body of work that has largely been ignored in the Western academy and media until now. The book outlines the ways in which a wide range of resident and diasporic writers have sought to represent the conflict, mourn the violence and terror associated with the conflict, and present options for reconciliation in the conflict’s aftermath. The writers discussed grapple with issues of terrorism, human rights, nationalism, war, democracy, gender, ethnicity, and reconciliation, making this a study of profound interest for students and scholars of South Asian literature and culture, postcolonial studies, race and ethnic studies, women’s studies, and peace studies.
Jayasuriya’s work is a thought-provoking engagement with matters of violence and the violence of memory, as well as questions of literary forms of mourning and the shared precarity of lives in the midst of ethnic conflict. Through a close reading of a wide variety of Sri Lankan ‘stay-at-home’ and diasporic writers and varied historiographic positions, Jayasuriya’s theoretically accomplished work demonstrates how ‘the literature of conflict’ might also offer ways of dealing with loss, a nation’s scarred history and grief. Her attention to literary constructions of empathy, unsettlement and reconciliation in Arasanayagam, Ondaatje, Selvadurai, Vanderpoorten, Wijeratne and other writers make the work relevant not only to the specifics of Sri Lankan literature but also to any literature that negotiates trauma, ethnicide and cultural memory. There is a wealth of material here, neatly organized, and a sustained interrogation of literary form and theme which makes Terror and Reconciliation a necessary, and valuable, addition to reading lists for trauma studies, postcolonial studies and conflict writing studies.