This qualitative study examines religious engagement and ethnic and religious identity formation in 1.5 and second generation Sri Lankan American young people at Dharma Vijaya Buddhist Vihara and the Sarathchandra Buddhist Center, two Sri Lankan Sinhala Theravada Buddhist temples in the greater Los Angeles area. This study analyzes data from participant observation at 3 temples, 10 in-depth interviews, and a survey of 50 respondents. It explores the two different approaches these temples take toward their noncoethnic congregation and the 1.5 and second generation: cultural reconstitution and cultural preservation. Specifically, the study considers these generations' varied temple experiences, relationships with clergy, and negotiations of multiple layered identities. Ultimately, regardless of self-labels, 1.5 and second generation's views on self-identity participate in different types of resistance: resistance as pride in their difference, resistance against a mainstream American identity, and resistance against being racialized as Other.

This study explores the role of embodied memory on identity formation in U.S.-born and/or raised Sinhala Sri Lankan Americans through the frame of temporal diasporic embodiment. At the intersection of the body, diaspora, and time, a temporal diasporic embodiment engages with a diasporic experience of the body that exists in multiple locations, times, and racializations simultaneously, and is subject to various forms of power. A temporal diasporic embodiment reveals the impermanent and non-teleological nature of the body, ideologies of home, racializations, trauma, and generational understandings race, place, and time. The tensions between time, memory, and diaspora take on contradictory meanings that affect Sri Lankan Americans’ experiences and identities. As they grapple with their temporal misalignment, U.S. born and/or raised Sri Lankan Americans use different methods to redefine what it means to be Sri Lankan in the U.S.

Using an interdisciplinary and queer diasporic methodology, this study analyzes how diaspora is affectively experienced, how diasporic identities are formed and negotiated, and how intimacy influences diasporic imaginings of past and future. Specifically, this study examines how the tattooed diasporic body serves as an archive for embodied storytelling, how Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors depicts the visceral and the failure of the heteronational, how the solo play To T, or not to T? by D’Lo, a Sri Lankan Tamil American transmasculine performance artist, reveals how the diasporic body is regulated, how Sri Lankan Americans respond to antiblackness within their coethnic community and in U.S. society with a transnational social justice orientation, and how a politics of care manifests through rethinking auntiehood. In doing so, we see how Sri Lankan American bodies formed in diaspora create new epistemologies as they contend with the complexities of living as racialized diasporic subjects.