Ethno-linguistic cartographies as colonial embodiment in postcolonial Sri Lanka

Abstract

This chapter explores the impact of state and ethno-linguistic cartographies on populations in postcolonial Sri Lanka through Sri Lankan-Australian Ernest Macintyre’s Anglophone play Rasanayagam’s Last Riot (1990). It probes the involvement of transnational media as dislocated biopolitical apparatuses bound up with Sri Lanka’s colonial legacy, and questions a minority English-speaking elite’s perspectives on – and detachment from – ethnic tensions with which, largely, they do not dialogue. The argument in this chapter is that it is largely due to colonial embodiment through imbrications of language devises – aural materialities and media – that populations in postcolonial territories exacerbate ethno-linguistic differences, which end in turmoil and destruction. While creating a space to reflect meaningfully on the praxis of biopolitical apparatuses that remain operative in postcolonial nations, this chapter aims to problematise received views of biopolitics, and gestures towards a reading of the text as a manifestly postcolonial experience and reproduction of the debris of colonialism.