The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora

The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lankan Diaspora
Author: Peter Reeves
Publisher: Editions Didier Millet
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2013
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 9814260835

Well over a million people of Sri Lankan origin live outside South Asia. The Encyclopedia of the Sri Lanka Diaspora is the first comprehensive study of the lives, culture, beliefs and attitudes of immigrants and refugees from this island. The volume is a joint publication between the Institute of South Asian Studies, NUS, and Editions Didier Millet. It focuses on the relationship between culture and economy in the Sri Lanka diaspora in the context of globalisation, increased transnational culture flows and new communication technologies. In addition to the geographic mapping of the Sri Lanka diaspora in the various continents, thematic chapters include topics on “long distance nationalism”, citizenship, Sinhala, Tamil and Burgher disapora identities, religion and the spread of Buddhism, as well as the Sri Lankan cultural impact on other nations.

Pain, Pride, and Politics

Pain, Pride, and Politics
Author: Amarnath Amarasingam
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2015-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820348147

Pain, Pride, and Politics is an examination of diasporic politics based on a case study of Sri Lankan Tamils in Canada, with particular focus on activism between December 2008 and May 2009. Amarnath Amarasingam analyzes the reactions of diasporic Tamils in Canada at a time when the separatist Tamil movement was being crushed by the Sri Lankan armed forces and revises currently accepted analytical frameworks relating to diasporic communities. This book adds to our understanding of a particular diasporic group, while contributing to the theoretical literature in the area. Throughout, Amarasingam argues that transnational diasporic mobilization is at times determined and driven as much by internal organizational and communal developments as by events in their countries of origin, a phenomenon that has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. His work provides an in-depth examination of the ways in which a separatist sociopolitical movement beginning in Sri Lanka is carried forward, altered, and adapted by the diaspora and the struggles that are involved in this process.

Encyclopedia of Diasporas

Encyclopedia of Diasporas
Author: Melvin Ember
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 1263
Release: 2004-11-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0306483211

Immigration is a topic that is as important among anthropologists as it is the general public. Almost every culture has experienced adaptation and assimilation when immigrating to a new country and culture; usually leaving for what is perceived as a "better life". Not only does this diaspora change the country of adoption, but also the country of origin. Many large nations in the world have absorbed, and continue to absorb, large numbers of immigrants. The foreseeable future will see a continuation of large-scale immigration, as many countries experience civil war and secessionist pressures. Currently, there is no reference work that describes the impact upon the immigrants and the immigrant societies relevant to the world's cultures and provides an overview of important topics in the world's diasporas. The encyclopedia consists of two volumes covering three main sections: Diaspora Overviews covers over 20 ethnic groups that have experienced voluntary or forced immigration. These essays discuss the history behind the social, economic, and political reasons for leaving the original countries, and the cultures in the new places; Topics discusses the impact and assimilation that the immigrant cultures experience in their adopted cultures, including the arts they bring, the struggles they face, and some of the cities that are in the forefront of receiving immigrant cultures; Diaspora Communities include over 60 portraits of specific diaspora communities. Each portrait follows a standard outline to facilitate comparisons. The Encyclopedia of Diasporas can be used both to gain a general understanding of immigration and immigrants, and to find out about particular cultures, topics and communities. It will prove of great value to researchers and students, curriculum developers, teachers, and government officials. It brings together the disciplines of anthropology, social studies, political studies, international studies, and immigrant and immigration studies.

South Asian Folklore

South Asian Folklore
Author: Peter Claus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 741
Release: 2020-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000101223

With 600 signed, alphabetically organized articles covering the entirety of folklore in South Asia, this new resource includes countries and regions, ethnic groups, religious concepts and practices, artistic genres, holidays and traditions, and many other concepts. A preface introduces the material, while a comprehensive index, cross-references, and black and white illustrations round out the work. The focus on south Asia includes Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, with short survey articles on Tibet, Bhutan, Sikkim, and various diaspora communities. This unique reference will be invaluable for collections serving students, scholars, and the general public.

Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements

Trends in Outside Support for Insurgent Movements
Author: Daniel Byman
Publisher: Rand Corporation
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2001-11-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0833032321

The most useful forms of outside support for an insurgent movement include safe havens, financial support, political backing, and direct military assistance. Because states are able to provide all of these types of assistance, their support has had a profound impact on the effectiveness of many rebel movements since the end of the Cold War. However, state support is no longer the only, or indeed necessarily the most important, game in town. Diasporas have played a particularly important role in sustaining several strong insurgencies. More rarely, refugees, guerrilla groups, or other types of non-state supporters play a significant role in creating or sustaining an insurgency, offering fighters, training, or other forms of assistance. This report assesses post-Cold War trends in external support for insurgent movements. It describes the frequency that states, diasporas, refugees, and other non-state actors back guerrilla movements. It also assesses the motivations of these actors and which types of support matter most. This book concludes by assessing the implications for analysts of insurgent movements.

Disaggregating Diasporas as a Force in Role Contestation

Disaggregating Diasporas as a Force in Role Contestation
Author: Matthew K. Godwin
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2022-09-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000641422

Using a Role Theory lens, this book investigates Tamil diaspora mass movements and interest groups as marginalised forces of domestic foreign policy influence. Until now Role Theory has not considered diaspora mass movements as collective action actors, nor looked at how marginalised diasporas influence elite foreign policy decision-making. Matthew K. Godwin employs a comparative, micro-level decision-making narrative that looks incisively at decisions faced by the British and Canadian governments in 2009 and 2013 towards the Sri Lankan civil war and its aftermath. Through qualitative, elite-level interviews and content analysis of other primary source data, Godwin convincingly argues that when diaspora interest group elites are leveraging the power of mass movements in concert with credible partisan advocates, they can influence role contestation. However, international institutional constraints on role behaviour may stymie their preferred role performance, especially if states are indispensable to the institutions their behaviour may unravel. Ultimately, Godwin concludes that some states can't behave "badly," even when they want to. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of lnternational Relations, Foreign Policy Analysis, Comparative Politics, Migration Studies and to non-government organisations who seek to influence governments.

Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora

Re-theorising the Indian Subcontinental Diaspora
Author: Nilanjana Chatterjee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527560546

It is estimated that more than 30 million people of Indian Subcontinental origin presently live outside their homeland. The present geo-political status of the Indian Subcontinental diaspora calls for more research and newer theorisation on how migrants from the Indian Subcontinent relocate, acculturate and renegotiate their identities in new host environments. This volume focuses on their historical, socio-cultural and economic patterns of migration and identity negotiation and formation within transnational discourses. While some of the chapters here focus on the nature of representations of the homeland and hostland in the works of Indian Subcontinental diasporic writers and film directors, others deal with the economic and historic aspects of the Indian Subcontinental diaspora. The book also includes chapters on women’s Kalapani crossings, liminal spaces, Anglo-Indian-Australian diaspora, Chinese-Indian-Canadian diaspora, and Indian Subcontinental-British home workers’ transnational space, ushering in a new era of diasporic identities.

Citizenship in Transnational Perspective

Citizenship in Transnational Perspective
Author: Jatinder Mann
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3031343581

This edited collection brings together leading and emerging international scholars who explore citizenship through the two overarching themes of Indigeneity and ethnicity. They approach the subject from a range of disciplinary perspectives: historical, legal, political, and sociological. Therefore, this book makes an important and unique contribution to the existing literature through its transnational, inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives. The collection includes scholars whose work on citizenship in settler societies moves beyond the idea of inclusion (fitting into extant citizenship regimes) to innovative models of inclusivity (refitting existing models) to reflect the multiple identities of an increasingly post-national era, and to promote the recognition of Indigenous citizenships and rights that were suppressed as a formative condition of citizenship in these societies.

Posthumanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedipal Spatiality

Posthumanist Nomadisms across Non-Oedipal Spatiality
Author: Java Singh
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1648893910

As an epistemological perspective, ‘nomadism’ is an emerging field of scholarship, offering intersectionality with eco-criticism, feminism, post-colonialism, migration studies, and translation. Much of the scholarship that uses the precepts of nomadism to read cultural texts and phenomena is scattered as separate articles in academic journals or as single chapters in books wherein the primary focus is the intersectional fields. Few book-length publications solely focus on the ramifications of nomadism; Posthumanist Nomadisms across non-Oedipal Spatiality fills that void. The fifteen chapters in this volume explore the possibilities offered by the nomadic perspective to explore a wide range of literary and cultural texts; organized into three sections, “Nomadic Assemblages,” “Non-Oedipal Cartographies”, and “Space-Time Montages”, that work as one to negate absorption into the interiority of sovereign territory. These sections are not an attempt at corralling the nomadic spirit into separate enclosures; instead, they are bands of warriors that operate the violence of the hunted animal, dehumanized human others, and earth others. The chapters are in constant multi-vocal conversations with narratives that camp on the turbulent weathers of global transitory spaces. They charter real or intellectual turfs of interstitial/rhizomatic nomadic epistemologies as political resistance to the exclusionary practices of a violently wired world. This book will appeal to post-graduate students, researchers, and faculty in the departments of literature, comparative literary and cultural studies. Researchers in sociology, cultural anthropology, gender studies, and migration studies will also find the material applicable to the expanding approaches available in their fields.

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka
Author: Anoma Pieris
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2018-10-25
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351246321

Analyses of the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) overwhelmingly represent it as an ethnonationalist contest, prolonging postcolonial arguments on the creation and dissolution of the incipient nation-state since independence in 1948. While colonial divide-and-rule policies, the rise of ethnonationalist lobbies, structural discrimination and majoritarian democracy have been established as grounds for inter-ethnic hostility, there are other significant transformative forces that remain largely unacknowledged in postcolonial analyses. This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways. Based around three themes – normative spaces, human mobilities and exilic states – it is organised into ten comprehensive, chapter-based explorations of a range of spatial units, including homes, cities, routes, camps and experiences of ruin that were irrevocably politicised by protracted conflict. Focusing on their material transformations over a thirty-seven-year period, the book explores what can be known of the war if we look beyond ethnicity to other salient, shared geographical features of this embattled history. The book uncovers how fealty to exclusionary cultures of political sovereignty aligns us with their violence, limiting our capacity for empathy, a boundary seemingly exacerbated by neoliberal opportunities. Making use of Sri Lanka as a case study to test geographic, architectural and urban methodologies for understanding violence, this book acts as a provocation to rethink current readings of the particular case study while reflecting on the more general impact of marketisation and militarisation in Asia. It will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including those scholars interested in South Asian history, politics and civil war, South Asian studies, border studies, geography and architecture and urban studies.