CANCELED Center for South Asia Weekly Lecture Series: Vasugi Kailasam, Asst Professor, Tamil Studies, UC, Berkeley

Through this talk, I want to trace the mobile genre of the “refugee narrative” in Sri Lankan Tamil writing. By looking at the Sri Lankan Tamil novel Mmm, by Shoba Shakthi, translated into English as Traitor, this talk examines if the Tamil refugee narrative can embody ideas of displacement and belonging in terms of both thematic and formal elements which might, in turn contribute to the creation of a uniquely Sri Lankan subjecthood that can frame discourses of statehood and reconciliation.