In the Caribbean context, the rhizome is associated with Edouard Glissant’s use of the concept to describe the multifaceted and complex intricacies that shape the creole identity (Poétique de la Relation, 1990). “First theorized by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, 1980), the philosophical concept of the ‘rhizome’ suggests epistemological connections that draw on multiplicity, non-linearity and de-hierachization, rather than traditional modes of knowledge that follow constructions in ‘arborescence’. Panel 1, Moving the Center: Affect, Implication, and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures (I) With a primary focus on postcolonial literature and theory, Harshana’s work is interdisciplinary in nature and spans fields such as sociolinguistics, nationalism and history.” Harshana is active in the promotion of Anglophone literature as a Trustee of the Gratiaen Prize for English creative writing instituted by Michael Ondaatje and is also a member of the State Literary Panel of Sri Lanka. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. He is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (UCL Press 2018) and has published in journals such as boundary 2, the Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Postcolonial Text among others. He the Sri Lanka Chair at the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg in 2019 and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Currently, he is a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen) in Vienna and will take on another Visiting Fellowship at the University of Zurich later this year. Harshana Rambukwella is professor in English at the Postgraduate Institute of English, the Open University of Sri Lanka.
#Kaka file shredder series
Exploring both the actual protest movement and literary entanglements with the notion of solidarity, I offer a series of critical reflections on the limits and possibilities of solidarity in postcolonial societies and argue that deep solidarity is a tenuous and at time idealistic but nevertheless morally and even pragmatically superior alternative to other ways in which solidarity has been imagined. I argue that this movement represents a form of ‘deep solidarity’ that stands in contrast to other iterations of solidarity such as enchanted and disenchanted solidarities and vertical and hierarchical solidarites that are often marred by instrumentalist motives shaped by geo-political power and other forms of instrumental power structures. But in spite of this despondent outlook, a youth-led protest movement, that transcends the many institutional, social and economic fault lines, that have characterized Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history has emerged. Mired in a deep and intractable economic and governance crisis the country’s future looks dark. This talk explores what solidarity might mean in the current geo-political context through the specific example of postcolonial Sri Lanka, which is experiencing an existential threat unprecedented in the country’s contemporary history.
0 kommentar(er)
