Thilini Meegaswatta, … whose title is “Temporality of History: A Reading of the Contemporaneity of the Past in Post-war Sri Lanka” … an article presented in Proceedings of the Open University Research Sessions in 2020
This short article is a reflection on how temporality— that is ‘time’ insofar as it manifests itself in human existence (Hoy, 2009, cited in Bryant, 2009)— interacts with socio-political realities and behaviours of conflict-ridden societies in complex ways. I draw on recent political history in Sri Lanka — a South Asian island nation that had faced protracted warfare—in an attempt to demonstrate how each political moment, each configuration of political identity constitutes a melange of temporal signatures that distorts the notion of a linear time line. In other word,s the examples elaborated are expected to illustrate how the present is legible only in the view of the past and also anticipated/ imagined futures, and as such, bear inscriptions of other times. On the other hand, I also contend that the past is a shifting narrative—a construct mangled by the discursive conditions of the time of recall— which is nevertheless at the heart of the question of national identity and nation-state building (Thapar, 2014). The arguments and observations in this paper that are made in relation to Sri Lanka can nevertheless be applied to other conflict-ridden societies whose constant attempts to re/imagine a collective national identity and a consciousness is haunted by violent legacies and future anxieties.
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