[Reader-list] MONDAY: Talk at CMCS by Malathi de Alwis

[Shilpa Phadke]

The Centre for Media & Cultural Studies, TISS would like to invite you to a
talk:
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*Tracing the 'Disappeared': Political Community in the Wake of Atrocity*
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Speaker:           Malathi de Alwis

Date:                11 August 2008, Monday

Time:                4 pm – 6 pm

Place:               Classroom: IV, TISS Old Campus, Deonar, Mumbai



*Abstract:*

Forced disappearance is one of the most insidious forms of violence as it
seeks to obliterate the body and indefinitely extends and exacerbates the
grief of those left behind. In this paper, I consider how such chronic
mourners 'reinhabit the world' in the face of continuously deferring loss,
and seek to theorise what might be its political outcome(s). Arguing that
this re-inhabiting is a constant tracing of traces given the ambiguous
nature of the disappeared's status of absence, and thus presence, I explore
a particular 'identification with suffering' that is embraced and embodied
by Sinhala women whose children were 'disappeared' during the second
People's Liberation Front (JVP) uprising (1988-1993). In such a context,
visual and tactile objects such as photographs and clothing, I suggest,
become especially meaningful by reasserting the presence of the disappeared.
In conclusion, I engage Judith Butler's contention that grief is a tie that
binds and thus enables the imagining of alternative political communities to
reflect on how such a conceptualization might be helpful to re-invigorate
political communities in Sri Lanka.



*About the Speaker:*

Malathi de Alwis is a Senior Research Fellow at the International Centre for
Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka and also teaches in the Faculty of
Graduate Studies, University of Colombo. She is the co-editor, with Kumari
Jayawardena, of Embodied Violence: Communalising Women's Sexuality in South
Asia (1996) and of Feminists under Fire: Exchanges Across War Zones (2003),
with Wenona Giles et al. Her current work explores how people re-inhabit
their worlds  in the wake of extraordinary violence and devastating loss.