Kitana Ananda: Mobilizing Diaspora: Tamil Activisms at War’s End
Displaced and dispersed by over thirty years of war and political violence, Sri Lankan Tamils have not forgotten their former and imagined homes in the process of remaking their lives across the globe. On the contrary, while exiled activists have been instrumental in the production and dissemination of competing narratives about the war from its very beginnings, new generations born and/or raised outside the island have emerged to redouble their efforts. As a 2002 ceasefire disintegrated into total war, these activists mobilized thousands of diasporic Tamils to non-stop public protest in metropolitan cities around the world.
This paper examines how diaspora, with its “cultures of circulation,” (Lee and LiPuma 2002), has become a site of political becoming for Tamils within, across and beyond nation-states. Through an ethnographic study of diasporic activisms, I discuss how and why Tamils in Canada and India protested the war in Sri Lanka, soliciting their states, fellow citizens and other Tamils to “take immediate action” on behalf of a suffering people. My study asks: How do Tamil activists demonstrate and advocate for the livelihoods and self-determination of their kith and kin “back home”? How do the social conditions of life in diaspora generate and remake their political commitments? What are their requests, demands, and grievances, to whom are they addressed, and in what forms do these actions circulate? Through these questions, I explore how experiences of displacement, migration, and resettlement constitute Tamil diaspora as a set of contentious political practices on the margins of modern liberal states.
In doing so, this paper will consider how activism, as a doctrine and practice of political action, produces and transforms what it means to be Tamil in the contemporary world.
Biographical Statement:
Kitana Ananda is pursuing her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology atColumbia University. She is currently writing her dissertation, “Politics After a Ceasefire: Becoming Tamil Subjects in Diaspora.” Her research interests include the social semiotics of subjectivity, citizenship, postcoloniality and violence, and the making of modern public spheres in South Asia, North America and beyond.
