Memories of Exile, Memory in Exile: The Sri Lankan Separatist Conflict in the Films of Pradeepan Raveendran
Résumé
In this article, we wish to examine the place of the memory of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka and how it is transmitted. We analyze how stories, memories, and narratives collide, and how Sri Lankan Tamil migrants in France seek out traces of their past to negotiate their inclusion in the present. Using a body of film - Pradeepan Raveendran’s creations - and interviews with the filmmaker, we explore how each personal history of the conflict accounts for the reorganization of the subject’s identity and environment, and thus, is perpetuated from one generation to the next. This article explores building on Stef Craps’s work on postcolonial trauma, how the memory of this conflict is transmitted in France. We also analyze how each actor negotiates a new space, both real and imaginary, in the space of the diaspora. Finally, we look at how the past is reconstructed to build a collective memory akin to Maurice Halbwachs’s new “social frameworks” (Halbwachs Citation1925).