UC Riverside

This dissertation engages Sri Lankan Anglophone literary texts to propose how we can attend to war and disaster without using a totalizing narrative of grief and loss. With the help of several texts—Nayomi Munaweera’s Island of a Thousand Mirrors, V. V. Ganeshananthan’s “Hippocrates,” Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts, Jean Arasanayagam’s “All is Burning,” Sonali Deraniyagala’s Wave, Simon Harris and Neluka Silva’s The Rolled Back Beach: Stories from the Tsunami, and Hasanthika Sirisena’s “The Other One,” “Third Country National,” and “War Wounds”—my project illuminates how contemporary moral and political economies around trauma manifest in problematic ways, and celebrates how literary representations of those excluded from institutionalized knowledge can dismantle these economies. My research urges academics situated within postcolonial studies and critical trauma studies to disrupt the myths of our disciplinary training. I underscore the reminder that trauma and its effects should not be universally cast as pathology or permanent condition. Moreover, my dissertation alerts us to the transformative power of attending to a diversity of stories about experiences and meanings of what we understand as trauma.