VIRTUAL IAS Festival: Imaginative Geographies

Imaginative Geographies: The place of Sri Lanka in contemporary Sri Lankan writing in English. With Professor Tariq Jazeel, Ameena Hussein, Dr Shermal Wijewardene, Packiyanathan Ahilan, Kanchuka Dharmasiri, Ruhanie Perera, Shyam Selvadurai and Neloufer de Mel.

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This panel, co-hosted by the Department of English at the University of Colombo and the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World at UCL, will bring authors and literary critics into conversation on Sri Lanka as an “imaginative geography”. Taking its cue from Edward Said’s term “imagined geographies” it will reflect on Sri Lanka as a place which is imaginatively named, framed and worlded through literary narrative across different periods/moments in time. At the heart of such a mapping are questions concerned with apprehending place and locating ourselves within it, and also of epistemology, or how we know what we know, as well as the conditions under which knowledge materializes, sediments or ruptures allowing for alternative epistemologies to emerge.

The panel brings together authors who are Sri Lankan, or are of Sri Lankan origin, whose fiction, performance, poetry and travelogue are set in Sri Lanka. The conversation will touch on what it means to situate oneself as a writer in/of Sri Lanka in relation to citizenship, travel, war memory, politics, diaspora, gender and queerness. It will also dwell on literary genres – their hybridities and performativities, questions of translation and adaptation, and the material conditions (including writing and reading habits) that deterritorialize and re-territorialize Sri Lanka in particular ways for the contemporary reader.

The 90-minute panel will feature three themed conversations between Sri Lankan writers and critics based at the University of Colombo. The first between Ameena Hussein and Shermal Wijewardene on mapping and routes; the second between Packiyanathan Ahilan, Kanchuka Dharmasiri, and Ruhanie Perera on translation and poetics; and the third between Shyam Selvadurai and Neloufer de Mel on diaspora and exile. The panel will be moderated by Tariq Jazeel (Co-Director UCL-CSSA) and will include time for audience Q&A.