Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, And PostcolonialityU of Minnesota Press - 273 oldal The lack of peace in Sri Lanka is commonly portrayed as a consequence of a violent, ethnonationalist conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. Viewed in this light, resolution could be attained through conflict management. But, as Qadri Ismail reveals, this is too simplistic an understanding and cannot produce lasting peace. Abiding by Sri Lanka examines how the disciplines of anthropology, history, and literature treat the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. Anthropology, Ismail contends, approaches Sri Lanka as an object from an “outside” and western point of view. History, addressing the conflict from the “inside,” abides by the place and so promotes change that is nationalist and exclusive. Neither of these fields imagines an inclusive community. Literature, Ismail argues, can. With close readings of texts that “abide” by Sri Lanka, texts that have a commitment to it, Ismail demonstrates that the problems in Sri Lanka raise fundamental concerns for us all regarding the relationship between democracies and minorities. Recognizing the structural as well as political tendencies of representative democracies to suppress minorities, Ismail rethinks democracy by redefining the concept of the minority perspective, not as a subject-position of numerical insignificance, but as a conceptual space that opens up the possibility for distinction without domination and, ultimately, peace. Qadri Ismail is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota. He has also been a journalist in Sri Lanka. |
Tartalomjegyzék
DisPlacing Sri Lanka ReConceptualizing Postcoloniality | 1 |
Reading a Sinhalese Nationalist History | 34 |
Reading a Tamil Nationalist History | 104 |
4 What to the Leftist Is a Good Story? Two Fictional Critiques of Nationalism | 169 |
Does Democracy Inhibit Peace? | 224 |
Notes | 247 |
Bibliography | 261 |
Index | 271 |
Más kiadások - Összes megtekintése
Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality Qadri Ismail Nincs elérhető előnézet - 2005 |
Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality Qadri Ismail Nincs elérhető előnézet - 2005 |
Gyakori szavak és kifejezések
abide by Sri actants analogy anthropology anticolonial argued argument Break-Up of Sri Buddhist called Ceylon Tamils chapter Chelvanayakam claim Colombo colonialism concept consequence consociationalism course critique culture democracy disciplinary history discipline discourse dominance elite empiricism emplotment epistemological ethnic conflict Eurocentrism Fanon fiction Goonesinha Gunasinghe hegemony Indian insist instance intellectual interpretive Jaffna Lazarus leftist LTTE majoritarian Majority Rules Managing Ethnic Tensions Marxism Minority Matters Muslims narrate narrative unit novel object opposed oppression past peace in Sri perspective Politics in Sri Ponnambalam position postcolonial present produce Qadri Ismail question of peace Rasanayagam reading Reaping the Whirlwind representation seek Senanayake significance Silva and Wilson simply Sinhalese and Tamil Sinhalese nationalism Sinhalese nationalist social science speak Sri Lanka Sri Lankan debate Sri Lankan history Sri Lankan Tamil story Subaltern Subaltern Studies Tamil nationalism Tamil nationalist tion Tissa understanding understood UpCountry Tamils Uyangoda violence Western
Népszerű szakaszok
2. oldal - Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
3. oldal - Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript — foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior.
100. oldal - How a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian's subtlety in matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind.
28. oldal - For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.
6. oldal - The essential vocation of interpretive anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have given, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said.
27. oldal - So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her.
7. oldal - No longer a marginal, or occulted, dimension, writing has emerged as central to what anthropologists do both in the field and thereafter. The fact that it has not until recently been portrayed or seriously discussed reflects the persistence of an ideology claiming transparency of representation and immediacy of experience. Writing reduced to method: keeping good field notes, making accurate maps, "writing up
43. oldal - The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.
29. oldal - Reporting on, or better still, participating in, antisexist work among women of color or women in class oppression in the First World or the Third World is undeniably on the agenda. We should also welcome all the information retrieval in these silenced areas that is taking place in anthropology, political science, history, and sociology.
176. oldal - ... a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.