Spatialising politics : culture and geography in postcolonial Sri Lanka / edited by Cathrine Brun, Tariq Jazeel.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Spatial politics and postcolonial Sri Lanka / Tariq Jazeel and Cathrine Brun -- The imagined spaces of empire / Nira Wickramasinghe -- Coffee, disease, and the 'simultaneity of stories-so-far' in the highlands of 19th-century Ceylon / James Duncan -- The distance of a shout / Sharon Bell -- Cartographic violence : engaging a Sinhala kind of geography / Benedikt Korf -- Geography, spatial politics, and productions of the national in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's ghost / Tariq Jazeel -- Meeting places? : centre and periphery in civil society peace work / Camilla Orjuela -- Rebuilding lives, undermining oppositions : spaces of war and peace in the North / Nihal Perera -- Fractured sovereignty : the LTTE's state-building in an interconnected world / Øivind Fuglerud -- Concluding thoughts / Cathrine Brun and Tariq Jazeel.

Print version record.

"Spatialising Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka" brings together essays on the theme of spatial politics of Sri Lanka. Space is an important factor in the ongoing ethnic conflict fuelling Sri Lanka's continuing civil war. Claims and contestations over the integrity of island space and the control of northern and eastern territories are central to the violently contested dispute. The editors view space from a different perspective. They argue that space is important through a number of registers less frequently invoked in dominant approaches to understanding postcolonial Sri Lankan nationhood, identity and difference. The book examines and historicizes the role of spatialities often occluded within the debates on Sri Lankan politics such as, cities and built-space, diasporic productions and imaginations, commodity cultures and their concordant networks, knowledge spaces and 'foreign' intervention, landscape and sacred space, as well as geographical knowledge. Situated at the intersection of human geography and postcolonial studies, the book signals the ways that postcolonialism and geography are intimately linked and how their intersections evoke the social, spatial and political effects of enduring colonial discourse and representation. In developing its argument, "Spatialising Politics" also gestures towards alternative spatial imaginations, possibilities and representations, at a time when spaces for alternative discourses on Sri Lankan politics are fast shrinking.

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