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Abstract
This essay meets the spatial turn in postcolonial studies in examining the representations of the contested space of the nation during and after the war in Sri Lanka in the work of Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Romesh Gunesekera. In their realist novels that portray the ethnic conflict and its ramifications, these writers approach the topography of Sri Lanka as the overlapping material and discursive sites of meaning shaped by the overdetermined forces of colonialism, class and ethnic strife, and postcolonial nation-building projects, postwar reconstruction and neoliberal policies. Their novels represent the erasure and recalibration of the contested space of the nation during and after the war – the dialectical effects of which can be seen in the discursive production of the North as “dangerous geographies”, an inhospitable terrain of death, disease, scarcity and violence, enabling both the erasure of landscape by war and its reconstitution after “peace”. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s discussion of the influential role colonial and postcolonial rule have played in the co-production of space and ethnic identity, and Aihwa Ong’s theorization of “neoliberalism as exception” in Asian contexts, this essay explores the ways in which these novelists represent postcolonial space as an anomaly riven with contradictions between the fixity of territorial discourse and the dislocations of war and neoliberal forces.
Notes
1 Following Said’s theorization of the construction of colonial space in Orientalism (Citation1978), I use the term “dangerous geographies” here to signify a particular set of attitudes, imaginaries and representational strategies that are deployed by Sivanandan and Gunesekara in depicting the postcolonial space of Sri Lanka.
2 De Silva draws attention to the ways in which this exclusion is built into the Sri Lankan Constitution, which declares Buddhism as the religion of the state and Sinhala as the official language (Citation1999, 187).
3 Here, Mbembe draws on Agamben’s theorization of states of exception, where constitutional rights can be suspended indefinitely; the process of removing a “subject from the purview of ‘regular’” law has become entrenched in the course of the twentieth century as a normal paradigm of government (Citation2005, 2). What was meant to be a provisional measure has become “state power’s immediate response to the most extreme internal conflicts” in contemporary politics and has been generalized and abused, making the difference between democracy and dictatorship very slim (2).
4 Much of Sri Lanka’s post-independence period has seen governance under states of emergency – a legacy of the colonial legal system – that became further consolidated when the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, No. 48 of 1979 (PTA) was converted into a permanent law in 1982 (Udagama Citation2015, 285). PTA, in combination with the ever-present emergency powers, which were sanctioned by the Constitution, provided a formidable legal framework to entrench the state of exception in Sri Lanka (286).
5
Neoliberal policies precede war in Sri Lanka. In a conflict that has persisted for more than twenty-five years, the links between structural adjustment, aid, and violence have been probed and analyzed, but one recent neoliberal trend to increase donor impact, “aid effectiveness”, warrants careful examination in light of increasingly securitized aid on a global scale and of recent war in Sri Lanka at a national level. (Hyndman Citation2009, 96)
6 A state of exception that has had an entrenched presence in Sri Lanka for nearly three decades has continued into the postwar period, encompassing economic development projects in war-affected areas (Jayasuriya Citation2012, 438). This is seen as an attempt by the Rajapaksa regime to reinforce “the continuation of a national security state and the concentration of power within the ruling clique” when it came into power for a second term in 2010 (Goodhand Citation2010, 350).