Narratives of Conciliation: Post-war Sri Lankan Literature in English

2009年5月，斯里兰卡军队与泰米尔伊拉姆猛虎解放组织（LTTE）结束了长达30年的内战，该项目探讨了战后斯里兰卡的文化政治和解。这个项目抓住了一个新兴的英语语料库，这些语料库是由常驻和散居作家创作的，包括小说、自传和叙事新闻，它们关注的是战争后讲故事的道德要求。因此，这项研究的一个主要贡献在于它将过渡时期司法范式（斯里兰卡目前最紧迫的问题之一）从政治领域转化为文化领域。因此，该项目将这一写作主体视为“和解叙事”，其中相互协议的尝试，通常被吹捧为持续和解的先决条件，可能会在叙事干预的低调但普遍的基调中进行排练。如果考虑到这个国家被三个帝国殖民的复杂遗产以及随之而来的种族冲突，该项目表明，回归到以前的状态是不够的，如果不是无法实现的话。相反，它将“和解”的文学范畴定位在斯里兰卡一些关于宗教民族主义、真实性和世俗批评的理论家的作品中，并与后殖民理论家爱德华·赛义德关于对位性的论文相结合。

This project explores the cultural politics of reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka since the ending of the three decades long civil war between the Army and the insurgents of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009. The project seizes upon an emergent corpus of Anglophone literature by resident and diasporic writers – novels, autobiographies and narrative journalism – that concerns with an ethical imperative of storytelling in the aftermath of war. A major contribution of this research thus lies with its move towards translating the transitional justice paradigm – one of the most pressing issues in Sri Lanka at present – from the political to the cultural domain. As such, the project conceives this body of writing as ‘narratives of conciliation’ wherein attempts at mutual agreement, often touted as prerequisites for sustained reconciliation, may be rehearsed in the muted but pervasive undertones of narrative interventions. If one considers the country’s complex legacy of colonisation by three empires and the ensuing ethnic conflict, a return to a status quo ante, the project suggests, is inadequate, if not unattainable. Instead, it locates the literary category of ‘conciliation’ in the works of select Sri Lankan theorists on religious nationalism, authenticity, and secular criticism, in conjunction with the postcolonial theorist Edward Said’s thesis on contrapuntality.