Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Sathiyaseelan, Sinduja

Titel

Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War by Nimanthi Perera-Rajasingham (review)

Ist Teil von

• Ariel, 2020-10, Vol.51 (4), p.185-188

Ort / Verlag

Calgary: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war between the state government and paramilitary rebel group the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known more simply as "the Tigers" or the LTTE) has officially been over for eleven years, but public knowledge of the war outside of the South Asian region remains scant. Chapter Three focuses on working-class women's theatre in the government-controlled Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in Sri Lanka, which are taxfree zones set up to provide multi-national corporations the factories needed to produce goods for international sale. While the text at times fails to fully explain its theoretical backing—for example, it lacks a robust discussion of assemblage theory—the book brilliantly analyzes various ethnographic fictions and state-produced narratives to show how the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE, through neoliberal policies and internationally funded and oriented structures, created and maintained ethnic divisions between Sinhalese and Tamil people to justify war. Because this book brings together various interdisciplinary subjects like global economic policy, literature, and human rights studies, it could be useful to scholars studying such varying topics as South Asian politics, postcolonial capitalism, South Asian literature, and ethnographic methodology.