UC Berkeley

Since the 1980s, Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict has caused the mass migration of over a million ethnic Tamils from their homeland, creating a transnationally interconnected Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora deeply engaged in homeland politics. This study focuses on the Tamil-Canadian diaspora, the largest Sri Lankan Tamil community outside of Sri Lanka. It seeks to explore the way particular histories of war, refugee migration, and a sustained relationship with media technologies and objects have shaped the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora’s collective memory and diasporic consciousness. Through paying particular attention to second-generation Tamil-Canadians, this study investigates how this generation interacts with, are influenced by, and ultimately tries to contribute to this community’s evolving diasporic consciousness.

Building an interdisciplinary methodology, this study blends together digital ethnography, participant observation, media and visual culture analysis, as well as in-depth interviews to consider various interrelated questions about the forces that shape the identity, collective memory, and political subjectivities of this diasporic community. This study argues that it is useful to approach this community and others like it through the framework of what it means to study a refugee diaspora. The refugee diaspora framework asks us to consider how diasporic communities that migrate to escape war are wholly shaped by the particular conditions of their violent dispersal and the continuities that stem from it. These continuities extend far beyond the legal term, ‘refugee’ and have lasting effects on the diasporic imaginings of future generations. This study also argues that the collective memory of this transnational diaspora is one that is maintained by both politicized narratives forwarded by community organizations and more amorphous and embodied memories and traumas carried by individuals and families. This collective memory is then continually mediated through what this study calls a visual landscape of identity, which is made up of the media technologies, media objects, local realities, imagined homelands, and inherited traumas that the Tamil-Canadian diaspora engages with. Finally, this study argues that in their place-making projects, the second-generation of this diaspora is learning how to contribute to an evolving sense of diasporic consciousness through integrating their unique experiences, perspectives, and political subjectivities into the tapestry of Tamil identity woven by the generations before them.