The American Impact on Sri Lanka


Book Description

Contains a selection of papers presented at the Seminar on the American Impact on Sri Lanka, held at Kandy, 28th-29th Mar. 1987.







The History of Sri Lanka


Book Description

Sri Lanka—an island nation located in the Indian Ocean— has a population of approximately 19 million. Despite its diminuative size, however, Sri Lanka has a long and complex history. The diversity of its people has led to ethnic, religious, and political conflicts that continue to exist. Peebles describes the experiences of the country, from its earliest settlers, to civil war, to its current state, allowing readers to better understand this often misunderstood country. With an emphasis on the 20th century, chapters discuss the economy, religion, culture, and government of Sri Lanka. A timeline outlines key events in Sri Lankan history, as well as biographies of notable people, and a bibliographic essay.




Background Notes


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Sri Lanka At Crossroads: Geopolitical Challenges And National Interests


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Having celebrated its 70th year of independence in 2018, Sri Lanka, a strategically-positioned island nation, now finds itself with the potential to be a super connector in fast-developing Asia. While carving out a place for itself in the international arena, Sri Lanka has simultaneously had to look inwards to recover and rebuild its potential, bruised by an era of colonial rule and nearly 30 years of a civil war, with two youth insurrections.This book examines these twin dimensions. First, how Sri Lanka is negotiating its international reach and the spheres of influence that extend from other Asian and world powers, and second, how the country is engaging in nation-building, from days of racial riots to ones of peace-building, reconciliation, more robust governance, and the development of cyber security.Written from the perspective of a Sri Lankan academic and the head of the national security think tank, this book offers insights into how the country has addressed its post-conflict as well as geopolitical challenges, navigated through domestic politics, and ramped up peace-building efforts, to now reach a junction where it can put its foot firmly on the road to prosperity in a new Asian world order.




Not Quite Paradise


Book Description

A chronicle of life on the resplendent island, combining the immediacy of memoir with the vividness of travelogue and reportage Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an eighteen-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island—its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. They hear stories of the island’s colorful past and its twenty-five-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tigers. When, having returned home to Tucson, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island’s southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back. Traveling from the southernmost coasts to the farthest outposts of the Tamil north, she witnesses the ravages of the tsunami that killed forty-eight thousand Sri Lankans in the space of twenty minutes, and reports from the ground on the triumphs and failures of relief efforts. Combining the immediacy of memoir and the vividness of travelogue with the insight of the best reportage, Not Quite Paradise chronicles life in a place few have ever visited.







The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka


Book Description

Sri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world’s most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers, including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a “war without witnesses.” This book traces the ongoing engagement of international lawyer Francis A. Boyle during the last years of the conflict. Boyle was among the very few addressing the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government’s grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was taking place. This is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law.




Sri Lanka at the Crossroads of History


Book Description

The peoples of Sri Lanka have participated in far-flung trading networks, religious formations, and Asian and European empires for millennia. This interdisciplinary volume sets out to draw Sri Lanka into the field of Asian and Global History by showing how the latest wave of scholarship has explored the island as a ‘crossroads’, a place defined by its openness to movement across the Indian Ocean.Experts in the history, archaeology, literature and art of the island from c.500 BCE to c.1850 CE use Lankan material to explore a number of pressing scholarly debates. They address these matters from their varied disciplinary perspectives and diverse array of sources, critically assessing concepts such as ethnicity, cosmopolitanism and localisation, and elucidating the subtle ways in which the foreign may be resisted and embraced at the same time. The individual chapters, and the volume as a whole, are a welcome addition to the history and historiography of Sri Lanka, as well as studies of the Indian Ocean region, kingship, colonialism, imperialism, and early modernity.




Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times


Book Description

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka’s War argues that the bloody war fought between the Sri Lankan state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009 should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong’s theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham finds that ethnographic fictions have both internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses and critically engaged with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. She demonstrates that such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities and the devastations wrought by warfare. To this end, Assembling Ethnicities explores colonial-era travel writing by Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913); contemporary works by Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, Shobasakthi, Dharmasiri Bandaranayake, and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan; and cultural festivals and theater, including vernacular performances of Euripides’s The Trojan Women and women workers’ theater. The book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism’s entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights, the pastoral, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism.