The Postcolonial State as Container: Lessons on Nation-Building and the Nation-State from Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT

Sri Lanka provides a geopolitical lens to analyze theviolence (both overt and discursive) necessary for the formation of the postcolonial nation-state. Following Himadeep Muppidi’s concept of the zoological metaphor as one of the colonial signs in international relations, I first consider the nation-state as a container-box interms of a “treasure box” within international tourism and as represented on tourist maps, containing cultural artifacts and experiences that are both exotic and available. I then interrogate the nation-state as a container-box noting a ‘caged’ problem in both the civil war and the 2004 Tsunami. I argue that both the nationas a treasure-box and caged-problem arise simultaneously in the process and project of nation building, and therefore both the cultural and political representations of the state are necessary for assessing the limitations and possibilities of the state itself.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Krista Mahr, “Sri Lanka to Start Tally of Civil-War Dead,” TIME (November 28, 2013), available online at: http://world.time.com/2013/11/28/sri-lanka-to-start-tally-of-civil-war-dead/; The Associated Press, “Sri Lanka Starts Count of Civil War Dead,” Aljazeera America (November 28, 2013), available online at: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/11/28/sri-lanka-startscountingthecivilwardead.html.

² Jennifer A. Devine, “Colonizing Space and Commodifying Place: Tourism’s Violent Geographies,” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 25:5 (2017), pp. 634–50.

³ Himadeep Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2012).

⁴ Dorothy F. Lane, The Island as Site of Resistance: An Examination of Caribbean and New Zealand Texts (New York, NY: P. Lang, 1995), p. 3.

⁵ Chantal Mouffe, “For a Politics of Nomadic Identity,” in Travelers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, (ed.) George Robertson et al. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1994), pp. 105–13.

⁶ Sankaran Krishna, “Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India.” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 19:4 (1994), p. 508.

⁷ Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. xix.

⁸ Stephen P. Hanna, and Vincent J. Del Casino, Mapping Tourism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. xvi.

⁹ Mauricio Nieto Olarte, “The European Comprehension of the World: Early Modern Science and Eurocentrism,” (eds) Michael Kuhn and Hebe Vessuri, in The Global Social Sciences: Under and Beyond European Universalism, (Stuttgart, DE: Verlag Press, 2016).

¹⁰ Olarte,“The European Comprehension of the World,” p. 123.

¹¹ Deborah Philip, Unashamedly Related: 19th Century Anthropology and Sinhalese Subjects at the Berlin Zoo, (Madison, WI: Annual Conference on South Asia, 2018).

¹² Philip, “Unashamedly Related.”

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Cynthia H. Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2014), p. 26.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Olarte,“The European Comprehension of the World,” p. 126.

¹⁸ Jazeel, “Reading the Geography of Sri Lankan Island-Ness,” p. 400.

¹⁹ David B. Paxman, Voyage into Language: Space and the Linguistic Encounter, 1500–1800 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), p. 25.

²⁰ Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations, pp. 104–105.

²¹ Antoine Eche, “The Shores of Aphrodite’s Island: Cyprus and European Travel Memory, 1600–1700,” (ed.) Robert T. Tally, Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

²² Eche, “The Shores of Aphrodite’s Island,” pp. 100–101.

²³ Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations, p. 98.

²⁴ Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (trans.) Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2011), p. 350.

²⁵ Deborah Philip, “Unashamedly Related,” pp. 10–11.

²⁶ Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations, p. 98.

²⁷ Nihal Perera, Decolonizing Ceylon: Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Politics of Space in Sri Lanka (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 123.

²⁸ Ibid., 124.

²⁹ Ibid., 157.

³⁰ Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities, p. xxxiv.

³¹ Tariq Jazeel, Sacred Modernity: Nature, Environment, and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood, Vol. 12 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 64.

³² Jazeel, Sacred Modernity, p. 65.

³³ Shlomi Yass, “Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers: Conflict and Legitimacy,” Military and Strategic Affairs 6:2 (2014), p. 66, available online at: http://www.inss.org.il/he/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/systemfiles/SystemFiles/ShlomiYass.pdf.

³⁴ Ibid.

³⁵ Rajapakse 2009, as quoted by Jazeel, “Reading the Geography of Sri Lankan Island-Ness,” p. 400.

³⁶ Jazeel, Sacred Modernity.

³⁷ Yass, “Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers,” p. 66.

³⁸ Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations, p. 98.

³⁹ Krishna, “Cartographic Anxiety,” p. 508.

⁴⁰ Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

⁴¹ Ibid., 280.

⁴² Vivienne Jabri, “Colonial Rationalities, Postcolonial Subjectivities, and the International,” (ed.) Charlotte Epstein, Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2017), p. 39.

⁴³ Jabri, “Colonial Rationalities, Postcolonial Subjectivities, and the International.”

⁴⁴ Ramya Chamelie Jirasinghe, “The International Community’s Intervention during the Conclusion of the War in Sri Lanka,” Strategic Analysis 40:4 (2016), pp. 291–306.

⁴⁵ Jirasinghe, “The International Community’s Intervention during the Conclusion of the War in Sri Lanka,” pp. 293–301.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 302.

⁴⁸ Sharon Bell, “The Distance of a Shout,” (eds) Cathrine Brun and Tariq Jazeel, In Spatializing Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka, (Los Angeles, CA: Sage, 2009).

⁴⁹ Muppidi, The Colonial Signs of International Relations, pp. 6–7.

⁵⁰ ibid., 5.

⁵¹ ibid., 7.

⁵² Bell, “The Distance of a Shout,” p. 89.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Tariq Jazeel and Catherine Brun, “Introduction: Spatial Politics and Postcolonial Sri Lanka”, (eds) Cathrine Brun and Tariq Jazeel, in Spatializing Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka, Cathrine Brun and Tariq Jazeel, p. 12.

⁵⁵ Bell, “The Distance of a Shout,” p. 89.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 92.

⁵⁷ Antony Anghie, “Narrating the Nation and International Law,” (ed.) Phillip Darby, From International Relations to Relations International, (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), p. 34.

⁵⁸ Anghie, “Narrating the Nation and International Law,” p. 35.

⁵⁹ Ibid.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 43.

⁶¹ Ibid., 44.

⁶² Sudesh Bandara Mantillake Madamperum Arachchilage, Colonial Choreography: Staging Shri Lankan Dancers Under British Colonial Rule from the 1870s – 1930s, (College Park, MD: University of Maryland, Dissertation, 2018), available online at: https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/20993/MadamperumArachchilage_umd_0117E_18997.pdf?sequence=1.

⁶³ Ibid., 38.

⁶⁴ Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

⁶⁵ Tariq Jazeel, “Reading the Geography of Sri Lankan Island-Ness: Colonial Repetitions, Postcolonial Possibilities,” Contemporary South Asia 17:4 (2009), p. 407.

⁶⁶ Helen Kapstein, Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces (Lantham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), p. xvii.

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Shelby E. Ward

Shelby E. Ward is a transdisciplinary scholar who currently teaches at Virginia Tech and Tusculum University. She also holds a PhD in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought from Virginia Tech. Her research intersects political theory, critical international relations, and cultural studies as she investigates contemporary postcolonial power relations. Recent articles have been featured in Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, Interdisciplinary Political Studies, and Otherness: Essays and Studies.