Menace, fear and the long-term effects of militarization in post-war Sri Lanka

SYNOPSIS

In this talk I will concentrate on fear, menace, violence, and community in post-war Sri Lanka.  Sri Lankans of all ethnicities are afraid because of the enormous amount of violence in political and social life. This fear is also what gives shape and energy to this violence, which itself is always mobilized against menace---whatever form that may take. Many Sri Lankans ask ourselves why, after the end of thirty years of civil war, alongside violence and fault lines that continue to endure, even seemingly new violence against new actors also takes such predictable forms. In this talk as an ethnographer and commentator, I will grapple with this ever-pressing issue in Sri Lanka and in many post-war societies where violence unbound by wartime comes to percolate and be a preoccupying but difficult to name force in everyday life. The talk is then about the ubiquity of fear that is always in search of an object.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sharika Thiranagama explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life. Her work focuses on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization situating these processes in specific historical formations of “privates” and “publics” in South Asia. Her work in Sri Lanka on war and political violence explores the ways in which militancy, political violence and large-scale displacement became folded into intergenerational transmissions of memory and ethnic identification, arguing that the most profound effects of war and violence could only be understood through their impact on intimate and domestic life. Since 2014, Sharika Thiranagama has also carried out new work in Kerala, South India centering on Dalit agricultural communities in Kerala, South India. She examines how communist led political mobilization both transformed every day and political mobilization as well as reconfiguring older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life.

REGISTRATION

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