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On women participation in postcolonial Sri Lankan politics post 1978; a study.
During the fifty years since independence, Sri Lanka has made considerable strides in various spheres. Adopting a gender perspective, this volume discusses the impact on women of the social, political and economic developments which have occurred during these eventful decades. Bringing together activists and scholars, this important book thoughtfully reviews the different paths Sri Lankan women have taken to achieve greater political and economic empowerment and control over their lives.
This book explores the development of nationalism in Sri Lanka during the past century, particularly within the dominant Sinhala Buddhist and militant Tamil movements. Tracing the ways women from diverse backgrounds have engaged with nationalism, Neloufer de Mel argues that gender is crucial to an understanding of nationalism and vice versa. Traversing both the colonial and postcolonial periods in Sri Lanka's history, the author assesses a range of writers, activists, political figures, and movements almost completely unknown in the West. With her rigorous, historically located analyses, de Mel makes a persuasive case for the connections between figures like actress Annie Boteju and art historian and journalist Anil de Silva; poetry whether written by Jean Arasanayagam or Tamil revolutionary women; and political movements like the LTTE, the JVP, the Mother's Front, and contemporary feminist organizations. Evaluating the colonial period in light of the violence that animates Sri Lanka today, de Mel proposes what Bruce Robbins has termed a 'lateral cosmopolitanism' that will allow coalitions to form and to practice an oppositional politics of peace. In the process, she examines the gendered forms through which the nation and the state both come together and pull apart. The breadth of topics examined here will make this work a valuable resource for South Asianists as well as for scholars in a wide range of fields who choose to consider the ways in which gender inflects their areas of research and teaching.
Contributed articles.
Sandya Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone analyzed how female factory workers in Sri Lanka's free trade zones challenged conventional notions about marginalized women at the bottom of the global economy. In Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka Hewamanne now follows many of these same women to explore the ways in which they negotiate their social and economic lives once back in their home villages. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted over fifteen years, the book explores how the former free-trade-zone workers manipulate varied forms of capital—social, cultural, and monetary— to become local entrepreneurs and community leaders, while simultaneously initiating gradual changes in rural social hierarchies and gender norms. Free trade zones introduce Sri Lankan women to neoliberal ways of fashioning selves, Hewamanne contends. Her book illustrates how varied manifestations of neoliberal attitudes within local contexts result in new articulations of what it is to be an entrepreneur as well as a good woman. By focusing on how former workers decenter neoliberal market relations while using their entrepreneurial and civic activities to reimagine social life in ways more satisfying to them and their loved ones—what the author calls a politics of contentment—the book sheds light on new political possibilities in contexts where both reproduction of neoliberal economic relations and implementation of alternatives co-exist.
Rebel movements in Sri Lanka, Eritrea, Nepal, Columbia, and El Salvador among others report between 20-40% participation by female combatants. These women have largely been excluded from the literature around the recruitment, mobilization, and participation in violent social movements. If we acknowledge that young women are among those who might rebel, then existing paradigms on how rebellion occurs must also be re-imagined to include the experiences of the female combatant. Looking at the case of women's involvement in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, this dissertation aims to address two main overarching questions around female participation in rebel movements. The first set examines how we take seriously the politics around female participation in violent politics, without resorting to a feminist debate on agency. Assuming that female fighters are agentive actors, how to we understand their politics at an individual and collective level? The second explores how variations in state repression shape political identities and impact the eventual nature of political participation for Tamil women. How do we understand the agency of women confronting multiple forms of repression? Drawing upon existing theories of mobilization and participation, I argue that in order to understand the impact of state repression on female participation, we must adopt a new theoretical framework. This dissertation highlights the interactive nature of the relationship between the individual and the collective, expands the timeline of analysis to incorporate entire life histories, and understands female combatants as exercising `restricted agency'. The analysis uses a unique data set, relying on significant field work done over ten years as both an academic and a humanitarian worker. Significant trust built over time in local communities, allowed for entry into controversial spaces (detention centers, training areas, refugee camps) and difficult to access populations (female fighters, victims of gender-based violence). The theories developed in this qualitative study rely on the insight and concepts generated using an ethnographic approach to data gathering that includes CPOs, person-centered interviews, focus groups, and gathering testimonies. Working within the framework established above, I find that given pre-existing conditions of inequality (both political and gender), the identity of Tamil women are mobilized by multiple mechanisms, among which experiences of direct and indirect state repression are most likely to shape political identities and the nature of political participation.
Contributed articles.
Anthropologist Sandya Hewamanne spent time in a Sri Lankan free trade zone (FTZ) working and living among the workers to learn about their lives. "They were poor women from rural areas," Hewamanne writes, "who migrated to do garment work in transnational factories of a global assembly line. Their difficult work routines and sad living conditions have been examined in detail. When I was with them I often wondered whether anyone noticed the smiles, winks, smirks, gestures, tones of voice, the movies they saw, or the songs they sang." Hewamanne deftly weaves theories of identity, globalization, and cultural politics throughout her detailed accounts of the workers' efforts to negotiate ever shifting roles and expectations of gender, class, and sexuality. By analyzing how these workers claim political subjectivity, Hewamanne's Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone challenges conventional notions about women at the bottom of the global economy. The book offers a fascinating journey through the vibrant subaltern universe of Sri Lankan female migrant workers, from the FTZ factory shop floor to boarding houses, from urban movie theaters to temples and beaches and back to their native rural villages. Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone captures the spirit with which women confront power and violence through everyday poetics and politics, exploring how female workers construct themselves as different while investigating this difference as the space where deep anxieties and ambivalences over notions of nation, modernity, and globalization get played out.
This collection intervenes in key areas of feminist scholarship and activism in contemporary South Asia, particularly India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, while asking how this investigation might enrich feminist theorizing and practice globally.
Women novelists of the Sri Lankan diaspora make a significant contribution to the field of South Asian postcolonial studies. Their writing is critical and subversive, particularly concerned as it is with the problematic of identity. This book engages in insightful readings of nine novels by women writers of the Sri Lankan diaspora: Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case (2003); Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991), The Pleasures of Conquest (1996), and The Sweet and Simple Kind (2006); Chandani Lokugé’s If the Moon Smiled (2000) and Turtle Nest (2003); Karen Roberts’s July (2001); Roma Tearne’s Mosquito (2007); and V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage (2008). These texts are set in Sri Lanka but also in contemporary Australia, England, Italy, Canada, and North America. They depict British colonialism, the Tamil–Sinhalese conflict, neocolonial touristic predation, and the double-consciousness of diaspora. Despite these different settings and preoccupations, however, this body of work reveals a consistent and vital concern with identity, as notably gendered and expressed through resonant images of mourning, melancholia, and other forms of psychic disturbance. This is a groundbreaking study of a neglected but powerful body of postcolonial fiction. “This is an excellent study that I believe makes a significant and timely contribution to the fields of postcolonial literature, Sri Lankan anglophone literature, diasporic literature, women’s studies, and world literature. It was a stimulating and thought-provoking read.” Dr Maryse Jayasuriya, The University of Texas at El Paso.