Events

Sri Lanka: Landscapes of Massacre

By way of bonus, Suvendi has generously agreed to give an additional talk for those of us interested in Sri Lanka and/or the work of Michael Ondaatje. This talk situates itself at the intersection of body, landscape and violence, the forms of their inscription on and by one another, and our readings of those inscriptions. The war in Lanka, as a clash of incompatible nationalisms or competing homeland imaginaries, at its most elemental level pits one “territorial ego” against another. This seminar explores lines of connection between political violence and nationalised landscape as an artefact or text organised through historically embedded and ideologically loaded rhetorics and tropes. Such nationalised and mythopoeidcised landscapes work hand in hand with ontologised regimes of territoriality. With reference to Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Anil’s Ghost, the talk explores how land functions at once as object, scene and medium of violence and is the source, surrogate and repository for the violence visited on bodies. Suvendi’s paper will be followed by a local launch of Channa Wickremesekera’s In the Same Boat (Perera Hussein Publishing House, 2010). In this book Channa brings his characters into the close confines of a boat escaping from a conflict zone. He writes with keen insight into the psyche of the displaced. Will a series of unfortunate events precipitate disaster on them before nature unleashes a savage storm? Only time will tell as they race inexorably towards their destiny. Channa Wickremesekera is Sri Lankan born and has lived in Australia since 1990. He completed his PhD in History at Monash University in 1998. His published works include Best Black Troops in the World: British Perceptions and the Making of the Sepoy 1746-1805 and Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594-1818. He has also written two works of fiction: Walls and Distant Warriors and a number of articles and book chapters on South Asian history