Social Science Research Council

“Politics After a Ceasefire: Becoming Tamil Subjects in Diaspora”

My dissertation project explores how diasporic Sri Lankan Tamils create new modes of belonging and citizenship by engaging with a world of suffering ‘back home,’ through public performances of solidarity with, grief for, and commemoration of, their relatives in Sri Lanka.

After thirty years of political instability and violent conflict, an estimated one-in-four Sri Lankan Tamils currently lives outside Sri Lanka, with another one-in-four displaced within the nation-state’s territorial borders. In the process of remaking their lives across the globe, many Tamils have not forgotten their former (and ‘imagined’) homes. In the aftermath of a 2002 ceasefire agreement, Tamils in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, India, Italy, South Africa, Switzerland, the UK and the US, are engaged in demonstrations and protests, presenting grievances of sufferings to their governments and its citizens on behalf of their kith and kin in Sri Lanka. In considering how familial and public articulations of suffering attempt to unify multiple places into a singular diasporic space, I examine the role of ritual, temporality and affect in Tamil life. How do the social conditions of everyday life in diaspora transform political participation and its exclusions? What new subject positions emerge with the transnational circulation of Tamil cultural forms and political movements? Attending to these concerns, my research seeks to understand how and why "diaspora" has become a capacious site for the identification and mobilization of Sri Lankan Tamils. My research engages with critical literatures inside and outside anthropology in South Asian studies, diaspora studies, citizenship, and ritual, in order to trace the formation of these new social and political subjects. I suggest that the study of these transnational political practices uniquely articulates 1) how political ritual, understood as a technology of social mediation, binds (and is bound by) subjects into new forms of public belonging and 2) the normative and pragmatic claims of diaspora and its homelands in securing rights, obligations, and recognition within pluralist and multicultural states.