Scholarly Work
My academic research focuses on literature from the Global South, specifically on transnational writing from sites of conflict in South Asia that tests and crosses the boundaries of genres. It is informed by critical and cultural theories on migration and subjectivity and driven by my enduring belief in the socially transformative power of the written word – its ability to forge the deepest human connections in contexts of political and social repression.
My early research covered a range of topics including Indian literary feminism, migrant identity, chaos theory and literature, and the politics of translation. I have since written two field-defining monographs – Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place and Witness Literature: Culture, Memory and Contested Truths – that were both supported by research undertaken for Leverhulme Research Fellowships. My book of narrative non-fiction, Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared, is, in many ways, a literary companion to Witness Literature.
A select list of my publications can be found HERE.
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Writing Sri Lanka (Routledge, 2007) has proved to be an important critical intervention in the field of Sri Lankan literary studies; the book presents a framework for studying Sri Lankan literature in English by identifying and dismantling the hitherto established critical boundaries between resident and migrant writers and revealing Sri Lankan writers’ shared concerns and literary drives. Researched and written during the years of military ceasefire, this study identifies a form of critical territoriality in the reception of texts that served to reinforce the ethno-nationalist agenda of the Sri Lankan civil war. In many ways, Writing Sri Lanka is a book of hope. It shows how writers writing on the war work to unsettle exclusionary ethno-nationalist narratives and how their work builds creative alliances to imagine the nation anew.
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Witness Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025), expands my interest in literature from conflict zones into the field of testimony studies. It engages with the politics and poetics of bearing witness to the suffering of distant others by exploring literature from three sites of exceptional violence: the Cambodian Genocide, the Sri Lankan Civil War and honour killings from a range of borderscapes. It analyses fiction, non-fiction, memoir, autobiography, survivor testimony, journalism and grey literature to show how non-Western constructions of self, survival and justice test the limits of Western readings of testimony and trauma. It also outlines the critical paradigms of border witnessing and double agency in its formulation of the emergent field of ‘witness literature.’
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Twelve Cries from Home: In Search of Sri Lanka’s Disappeared (Repeater, 2022) draws together the experiences of twelve victim-survivors of the Sri Lankan Civil War. It is what I would call ‘a travelling memoir’, interweaving the navigation of survivors’ memories with reflections from my 1700 km journey across the island to visit them. This is the first book of Sri Lankan survivor testimony based on the experiences of civilians from across the island spanning a range of ethnic groups, communities and classes. While many of the survivors are relatives of the disappeared, a good many lost relatives in direct and open warfare. The book sets the context for a dialogue across people, inviting readers not only to remember but also to carry these stories forward.
Sample Essays and Extract
Nonlinear Dynamics and the Diasporic Imagination