Narratives of Conciliation: Post-War Sri Lankan Literature in English

This project explores the cultural politics of reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka since the ending of the three decades long civil war between the Army and the insurgents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. The project seizes upon an emergent corpus of Anglophone literature by resident and diasporic writers – novels, autobiographies and narrative journalism – that concerns with an ethical imperative of storytelling in the aftermath of war. As such, the project conceives this body of writing as 'narratives of conciliation' wherein attempts at mutual agreement, often touted as prerequisites for sustained reconciliation, may be rehearsed in the muted but pervasive undertones of narrative interventions. While suggesting that a positivist notion of reconciliation is inadequate, if not unattainable, to capture the country’s complex legacy of colonisation by three empires and the ensuing ethnic conflict, the project locates the literary category of conciliation in philosophical and anthropological discourses on suffering, compassion and consolation. Drawing from a corpus of seven novels and three reportage narratives, the project further builds on the methodological cues of a ‘narrative imaginary’ that encompasses fictional and non-fictional modes of storytelling in a post-war context. A major contribution of this research thus lies with its move towards translating the transitional justice paradigm – one of the most pressing issues in Sri Lanka at present – from the political to the cultural domain.

© Birte Heidemann-Malreddy

wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin

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Dr. Birte Heidemann-Malreddy

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Chair of English Literary Studies

Chair of English Literary Studies

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Fakultätsgebäude SLK, Raum 3.15 Wiener Str. 48

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Dr. Heidemann-Malreddy befindet sich im Moment in Elternzeit.