Postmemory in Chandran’s Song of the Sun God
“Sometimes Nala imagined that all of their family stories were filed away in that carefully ordered mind of Smrithi’s. She was their family’s memory. That thought comforted her–after she died, Smrithi would remember her for the family. Nala, Rajan, Mohan, Dhara and all the others would not be forgotten. Smriti would remember, and she would…
Dare I Speak for the Nation?
In a scholarly interview, V.V. Ganeshanthan discusses the pressure of representing a nation, particularly when asked to condense its complex history into a concise version. She shares that as an academic interested in the whole of Sri Lanka, she studies and talks about aspects that do not often get mentioned in mainstream discourses–such as the…
Constructing the Counter-/archive
“Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war” (Vuong 31) shares the protagonist of Ocean Vuong’s novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The fictional epistolary novel tells the story of a son writing to his mother in a language she could not understand. In the…
Haunting Intrusions & Diasporic Guilt in Ganeshananthan’s Love Marriage
In V.V. Ganeshanthan’s Love Marriage, I saw myself represented for the first time as a second-generation Sri Lankan Tamil woman carrying the weight of the civil war without ever having lived through it. Love Marriage inspired me to pursue my research interests and gave me the words to describe the inner turmoil that many of…
Global Anglophone Tamil Eelam Literature 