Gendered Nostalgia and Post-War Sri Lanka: Perspectives on Loss and Justice

• In Event: Violence Against Women

Abstract

This paper examines how different groups of activists and civil society within Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan diaspora conceive of memory, loss and healing in the Sri Lankan post-war transition. We look at how narratives and understandings of conflict, loss, recovery and justice become shaped by positionality, distance, and gendered memory, and what this means for those who engage with transition. The paper draws upon several years of qualitative field research carried out in war-affected areas of Northern Sri Lanka and diaspora Tamil communities in the UK. We find that different narratives of war, memory and the past significantly affect interviewees’ everyday perceptions, practices and imaginaries of (post-)war justice, loss and healing in the present. The paper looks at how Tamil female activists and survivors conceive of women’s empowerment during Sri Lanka’s civil war. We examine how militarisation and a dire post-war situation reinforce nostalgia for the wartime past and examine collective narratives around women’s experiences of the war years and the LTTE. We also look at the difficult engagements female activists have with their own communities where the wartime years are sometimes seen as an interruption of traditional exploitative social structures and cultural practices. Set against the backdrop of an exploration of diaspora politics and political mobilisation, we anchor our findings within work on nostalgia, trauma and the intergenerational transferal of political memory. We argue that encounters with a traumatic collective past are lived and recounted in gendered, politicised and complex ways. The paper speaks to wider literatures on gender and temporality in relation to conflict, and contributes to the interdisciplinary study of nostalgia politics, trauma and memory studies and the everyday in conflict and peace studies.

Authors

• Hannah Partis-Jennings, Loughborough University

• Rebekka C. Friedman, King's College London