“Will you be calling it a genocide or a war?”
While applying for grad school, I consulted with a South Asian Studies professor to get a better understanding of the research paths I could take to study the effects of the Sri Lankan conflict. During the conversation, the professor asked if I would call ‘it’ a “genocide” or a “war”. Until that point, I had been using the term interchangeably without thinking of its implications and how my framing of it, as either a “genocide” or a “war”, would indicate my positionality. In an effort to stay as true to the literature as possible, this blog uses both terms depending on the context in which is it written. Although, Canada officially acknowledges what occurred in Sri Lanka as a “genocide”, the United Nations has yet to make such a claim. Thus, I thread the water carefully, acknowledging that terms such as “war” and “genocide” hold significant, and at times, unimaginable weight.
My name is Shobekah, and I am a second-generation Sri Lankan-Canadian student completing my Master’s in English Literature. My research focuses on Anglophone Tamil Eelam literature produced in the diaspora, specifically looking at memory, intergenerational trauma, and national identity. My goal with this blog is to bring Eelam/Sri Lankan Tamil literature into the broader South Asian Studies discourse as well as war and refugee scholarship. I aim to make this blog a collaborative reference tool for those interested in learning and teaching this emerging body of literature.
Global Anglophone Tamil Eelam Literature 