Life narrative is a field which is currently drawing increasing academic interest in Sri Lanka, though life narratives are an integral part of the socio-political fabric of the nation. In the Sri Lankan, context biogr...Life narrative is a field which is currently drawing increasing academic interest in Sri Lanka, though life narratives are an integral part of the socio-political fabric of the nation. In the Sri Lankan, context biography and autobiography are commonly seen as two separate genres in life writing, but certain life narratives tend to blur those boundaries. From This Point Forward, a photography exhibition by Luka Alagiyawanna, My Mother’s Village, a documentary life narrative by Aaron Burton, and Project I Am by Kannan Arunasalam are some examples. The present study analyses life narratives from I Am Jaffna section in Project I Am1; a digital archive of life narratives of Sri Lankan elders. Based on the life narratives, memories, and experiences of Sri Lankan elders, the project strives to find out whether there was a time when people in Sri Lanka did not describe themselves as Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, or Burgher, or a time when ethnic identity was not the primary defining factor of an individual. The reviews and articles on the projects have looked at the project merely as a repository of stories that help Sri Lankans understand their differences and a project promoting reconciliation with hardly any focus on the project as a Sri Lankan life narrative, so that a gap bridged by the present study. The study also focuses on the concept and politics of “othering” with a view to exploring how these life narratives are constructed as Sri Lankan life narratives. For this purpose, the study focuses on the segment on people from Jaffna-I am Jaffa, since the Jaffna community has a long standing history of being “the other.” The inseparability of the concept and politics ofothering and the identity of Sri Lankans show that it is extremely challenging to dispose of the notion of the other as it has actually become an integral aspect of Sri Lankan identity and a social reality.展开更多
This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to...This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas,exploitation,hopes,and desires of generations who,in their diasporas,also helped create their modern nations,or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built.The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco's Vita,Vona Groarke's Hereafter:The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara,Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed's Timira:Romanzo Meticcio,and Maryse Conde's Victoire,les saveurs et les mots.At their center is the negotiation between the individual truth and the relational story across generations on the one hand,and,on the other hand,the tracing of collective histories such as those of nation,of colonization,of diaspora,of internal and external displacement,of rights and emancipation(the downtrodden,the poor,women,the migrant,the refugees),of the origins of dispossession and the permanence of its effects.At the core of the narratives is also the ghostliness of the erased(from history,from memory,from citizenship),the departed(in the sense of being dead and of having traveled away),and the in-between(generic:between the historical and documentary on the one hand,and the novelistic,the fable,fantasy on the other;geographical:between countries,between places,nationalities,national affiliations;historical:across generations;racial:the mestizo,the mulatto).It is,specifically,the biofictional imagination that enables these diasporic,transnational,transracial accounts to open up the possibility of a different,liberating future,by offering the space to imagine such a future,but also by recognizing,through its explicit acknowledgement of its recourse to fictionality,that it does not aim to construct a new myth to replace historical fact,but that it invites all of us to imagine,and strive to bring into existence,a different reality.展开更多
文摘Life narrative is a field which is currently drawing increasing academic interest in Sri Lanka, though life narratives are an integral part of the socio-political fabric of the nation. In the Sri Lankan, context biography and autobiography are commonly seen as two separate genres in life writing, but certain life narratives tend to blur those boundaries. From This Point Forward, a photography exhibition by Luka Alagiyawanna, My Mother’s Village, a documentary life narrative by Aaron Burton, and Project I Am by Kannan Arunasalam are some examples. The present study analyses life narratives from I Am Jaffna section in Project I Am1; a digital archive of life narratives of Sri Lankan elders. Based on the life narratives, memories, and experiences of Sri Lankan elders, the project strives to find out whether there was a time when people in Sri Lanka did not describe themselves as Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim, or Burgher, or a time when ethnic identity was not the primary defining factor of an individual. The reviews and articles on the projects have looked at the project merely as a repository of stories that help Sri Lankans understand their differences and a project promoting reconciliation with hardly any focus on the project as a Sri Lankan life narrative, so that a gap bridged by the present study. The study also focuses on the concept and politics of “othering” with a view to exploring how these life narratives are constructed as Sri Lankan life narratives. For this purpose, the study focuses on the segment on people from Jaffna-I am Jaffa, since the Jaffna community has a long standing history of being “the other.” The inseparability of the concept and politics ofothering and the identity of Sri Lankans show that it is extremely challenging to dispose of the notion of the other as it has actually become an integral aspect of Sri Lankan identity and a social reality.
文摘This article focuses on novels that,located on the boundary between biography,autobiography and fiction,between detailed archival historical research and imagination,between the documentary and the speculative,seek to reconstruct the life of an ancestor of the writer-narrator to reflect on the traumas,exploitation,hopes,and desires of generations who,in their diasporas,also helped create their modern nations,or whose story challenges the exclusions on which the concept of the nation has been built.The texts discussed are Melania Mazzucco's Vita,Vona Groarke's Hereafter:The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara,Wu Ming 2 and Antar Mohamed's Timira:Romanzo Meticcio,and Maryse Conde's Victoire,les saveurs et les mots.At their center is the negotiation between the individual truth and the relational story across generations on the one hand,and,on the other hand,the tracing of collective histories such as those of nation,of colonization,of diaspora,of internal and external displacement,of rights and emancipation(the downtrodden,the poor,women,the migrant,the refugees),of the origins of dispossession and the permanence of its effects.At the core of the narratives is also the ghostliness of the erased(from history,from memory,from citizenship),the departed(in the sense of being dead and of having traveled away),and the in-between(generic:between the historical and documentary on the one hand,and the novelistic,the fable,fantasy on the other;geographical:between countries,between places,nationalities,national affiliations;historical:across generations;racial:the mestizo,the mulatto).It is,specifically,the biofictional imagination that enables these diasporic,transnational,transracial accounts to open up the possibility of a different,liberating future,by offering the space to imagine such a future,but also by recognizing,through its explicit acknowledgement of its recourse to fictionality,that it does not aim to construct a new myth to replace historical fact,but that it invites all of us to imagine,and strive to bring into existence,a different reality.
