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

该项目探讨了自2009年5月斯里兰卡军队和泰米尔伊拉姆猛虎解放组织(猛虎组织)叛乱分子之间长达30年的内战结束以来，战后斯里兰卡和解的文化政治。该项目利用了当地作家和散居海外的作家--小说、自传和叙事新闻--新兴的英语文学语料库，这些作家关注的是战后讲故事的伦理要求。因此，这项研究的主要贡献在于它将过渡司法范例--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，该项目将这一正文设想为“调解的叙述”，在这种情况下，通常被吹捧为持续和解的先决条件的相互同意的尝试，可能会以叙事干预的低调但普遍的语气进行排练。如果考虑到该国被三个帝国殖民以及随之而来的种族冲突的复杂遗产，该项目表明，恢复到以前的状态是不够的，如果不是无法实现的话。相反，它在斯里兰卡精选的关于宗教民族主义、真实性和世俗批评的理论家的作品中，结合后殖民主义理论家爱德华·赛义德关于巧妙的命题的论文，找到了文学上的调解范畴。

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.