Haunting memories: Sri Lankan civil war, trauma and diaspora in literature and film

ABSTRACT

The article is concerned with the recent literary and cinematographic representation of the Sri Lankan civil war – one of the most gruesome and violent conflicts in the history of contemporary South Asia. It analyses Sri Lankan – American author’s V. V. Ganeshananthan’s novel Love Marriage and French filmmaker’s Jaques Audiard’s film Dheepan. The aim of this article is to investigate how two forms of different cultural production (a novel and a film) hailing from different cultural backgrounds and experiences, explore and discuss the traumatic legacies of Sri Lankan civil war in the diasporic space. The article argues that the novel and the film function as trauma narratives which insist on the haunting quality of war-related memories and experiences, emphasising trauma’s transnational and transhistorical aspect since it continues possessing its subjects no matter of where they come from or where they are born.

KEYWORDS:

• Sri Lanka
• civil war
• trauma
• diaspora
• migration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Deimantas Valančiūnas is Associate Professor of film and popular cultures of Asia at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University where he teaches courses on film studies, South Asian cinema and literature, postcolonial theory, visual cultures of Asia. His research interests include Indian and South Asian cinema, marginal and obscure film genres, postcolonial theory, diaspora and memory studies. He is an editor of a volume From Highbrow to Lowbrow. Studies of Indian B-grade Cinema and Beyond (2014) and a number of journal articles on Indian cinema. Currently, Deimantas Valančiūnas is co-editing a book volume ‘South Asian Gothic’ (co-editor Katarzyna Ancuta, expected to be published by UWP in 2021).