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Title: Landscapes of Loss: Tracing absent presence in Sri Lanka

Where & When:  April 22, 2008
                           341 Eggers Hall
                           4 pm

Type of Activity: Speaker

Speaking: Malathi de Alvis, Senior Research Fellow, International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Summary:Forced disappearance is one of the most insidious forms of violence as it seeks to obliterate the body and indefinitely extends and exacerbates the grief of those left behind. In this paper, I consider how such chronic mourners 'reinhabit the world' in the face of continuously deferring loss, and seek to theorize what might be its political outcome(s). Arguing that this re-inhabiting is a constant tracing of traces given the ambiguous nature of the disappeared's status of absence, and thus presence, I explore a particular 'identification with suffering' that is embraced and embodied by Sinhala women whose children were 'disappeared' during the second People's Liberation Front (JVP) uprising (1988-1993).

 

Sponsorship: The South Asia Center; Gender and Globalization

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