UC Berkeley

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.