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Introduction -- The factory is like the paddy field: Gam Udawa performances, neoliberalism, and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism -- In the shadows of neoliberalism: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the many lives of Shobasakthi in Gorilla and Dheepan -- How bodies matter: working-class women's theater in a time of war -- Bearing witness: human rights, and the politics of solidarity in Anil's ghost and The Trojan women -- Conclusion. Cartographies of loss: postwar neoliberalism, international tourism, and the vital art of Romesh Gunesekera and Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan. "Assembling Ethnicities in Neoliberal Times: Ethnographic Fictions and Sri Lanka's War" argues that Sri Lanka's bloody thirty year-long war, fought between the state and the separatist Tamil Tigers from 1983 to 2009, should be understood as structured and animated by the forces of global capitalism. Using Aihwa Ong's theorization of neoliberalism as a mobile technology and assemblage, this book explores how contemporary globalization, as an economic system and a governing rationality for the management of populations, has exacerbated forces of nationalism and racism. One of the book's key interventions is to argue that the form of Ethnographic Fictions is vital for understanding neoliberal assemblages. The fictions that belong to this form, "Assembling Ethnicities" suggests, have internalized certain colonial Orientalist impulses, but also critically engage with categories of objective gazing, empiricism, and temporal distancing. As the book demonstrates, such fictions take seriously the task of bearing witness, and documenting the complex productions of ethnic identities, and the devastations wrought by warfare. Arguing that ethnographic fictions is a more accurate term than realism for understanding the relationship between form, capitalism, and the production of races, Assembling Ethnicities begins by exploring the emergence of the form during colonialism by close-reading the travel writings of Robert Knox (1681) and Leonard Woolf (1913). Subsequently, the book interprets contemporary fictions to unpack neoliberalism's entanglements with nationalism and racism, engaging current issues such as human rights narratives, organicism, Tamil militancy, immigrant lives, feminism and nationalism, and postwar developmentalism--Provided by publisher
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