The recent arrests and detentions of Sri Lankan writers, bloggers and poets form part of a long history of extrajudicial detention which elucidates the ever-present stakes of writing about Sri Lanka, or simply Writing Sri Lanka. This graduate student conference aims to collectively reflect on how these stakes surface in Sri Lanka Studies research, regardless of genre or discipline. Who wields the power to determine which writings about Sri Lanka are legitimate and authentic? Who determines which writings are benign to the state and which writings pose a threat? Under what circumstances are some writings deemed dangerous or illicit, in the guises of patriotism, security, or even the global war on terror? What power do words have—whether in literature or academia, across different languages and genres—to question, critique, and surpass how the state and any other institutions draw and enforce these distinctions?

Panel 1: Writing the Sri Lankan Nation

A Comparative Analysis of the Coverage of Rabindranath Tagore’s third Trip to Ceylon in 1934

Chamila Somirathna, Sinhala, University of Kelaniya

Resisting the Spectacular: Ethical Approaches to Engaging the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

Soraya Zarook, English, University of California, Riverside

Queer Voices in Post-War Transitional Sri Lanka

Thiyagaraja Waradas, Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath

Discussant: Anindita Banerjee, Comparative Literature, Cornell University

Panel 2: Writing Sri Lankan History

“Harmful” Genres in Sri Lankan Literary History: Revisiting Martin Wickramasinghe’s Bavataraṇaya

Crystal Baines , English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

From Kavikāra to Folk Singers: Sinhala Nationalism and the Folklorisation of Kavi

Tom Peterson, Music, SOAS, University of London

Discussant: Viranjini Munasinghe, Anthropology, Cornell University

Co-sponsored by the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies

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Zainab Usman is a senior fellow and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Her fields of expertise include institutions, economic policy, energy policy, and emerging economies in Africa. Her forthcoming book, Economic Diversification in Nigeria: the Politics of Building a Post-Oil Economy, is set to be published by Zed/Bloomsbury Press in June 2022.

2008 > Ukraine > Directed by Naomi Uman In 2006, filmmaker Naomi Uman retraced her great grandparents’ emigration from Eastern Europe in reverse, settling in the tiny village of Legedzine, Ukraine (about 350 miles south of Kyiv), where she lived for four years. The result of her adventures was “a quietly picaresque quintet of 16mm films, The Ukrainian TimeMachine. In capturing the joys and hardships of her neighbors’ centuries-old way of life…Uman created a new kind of living history, fresh with curiosity and verve.” (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) Tonight we’ll show three of the films. Unnamed Film (55 mins) is a beautiful documentary about life in Legedzine, cataloging its inhabitants’ various strategies of labor and resourcefulness, their heartiness and warmth. It will be bookended by Kalendar (12 mins), a poetic collection of shots, one for each month of an entire year; and Coda, a black-and-white epilogue encapsulating the themes of the series as a whole. At a time when we are witnessing the senseless destruction of Ukraine and its people on a daily basis, we offer a glimpse of what life was like not so long ago, and a window into the soul of a nation that is fighting for its very existence. In Ukrainian. Paraphrased subtitles in English. Cosponsored with the Institute for European Studies.More at https://creative-capital.org/projects/the-ukrainian-time-machine/ 1 hr 11 min