Memory and resistance in the London Tamil diaspora: reflections from the ‘Tamils of Lanka: a timeless heritage’ exhibition

This paper explores memory work in the London Tamil diaspora ten years since the end of the Tamil Information Centre. Examining the exhibition narrative, content and format, I argue that building spaces of shared and co-produced knowledge can be considered an act of resistance: coming together to share stories and ideas, to remember atrocity and resilience, and to document history from the Tamil perspective. Engaging with the exhibition as a space to remember - and for some in the diaspora, to encounter - the political potential of Eelam, the exhibition acknowledges the importance of such initiatives in reclaiming historical narratives and actively shaping the emerging narrative of the community

Familiarity and strangeness: seeing everyday practices of punishment and resistance in Holloway Prison

London’s Holloway Prison, the largest women’s prison in western Europe, closed in 2016. The impact of the closure on the women incarcerated in Holloway, and the prison’s place in the local community, is the focus of a project led by Islington Museum. Here, we develop an innovative, emotion-led methodology to explore photographs of the decommissioned Holloway, asking what they communicate about experiences of imprisonment and practices of punishment. The images illustrate the strategies of control, mechanisms of punishment and tactics of resistance that operate through the carceral space. From a feminist, anti-carceral perspective, we emphasise the importance of seeing prison spaces and attending to the emotional responses generated. We offer a creative intervention into dominant government and media narratives of Holloway’s closure and suggest that considering what it is that feels familiar and strange about carceral spaces has the potential to operate as a form of anti-carceral work

The Decaying Port City as a Tourist Destination. Valparaíso’s Commodified Decline

This article explores the neoliberal transformation of Valparaíso from a deindustrialised, declining city to a site of tourist appeal that commodifies, in an ambivalent but striking way, its own decay. We describe the city’s economic, social and cultural trajectory from a period of global importance as a key port city to deindustrialisation and the acceleration of the city’s decline and the imposition of violent economic policies between 1970s and 90s. Drawing on the notion of slow violence and critical literature around heritage, postcolonial, deindustrial and ‘poverty’ tourism, we trace the impact and materiality of economic abandonment into the present moment, together with the city’s contemporary reliance on tourism for economic survival through a form of dereliction tourism. In a port city like Valparaíso, which has suffered economic decline, widening inequality and precariousness, of which neoliberalism is one cause, the full plasticity and ambivalence of neoliberalization processes is revealed

Inscribing the Victor’s Land: Nationalistic Authorship in Sri Lanka’s Post-war Northeast

This article examines the nationalistic authorship of space in Sri Lanka’s post-conflict Northeast as part of the state’s nation-building strategy and as a continuation of a post-colonial process of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalistic revival. Exploring issues of historiography, conflict resolution, physical vehicles of ideology and collective memory, the article demonstrates how land policies, development and the tourism industry in a post-conflict context can go hand-in-hand with dispossession, militarisation and the humiliation of a ‘defeated’ minority community

Hope in activist criminology

In this chapter, I reflect on the place of hope in activist criminology. Offering reflections from my own activist scholarship, this chapter draws out the ways in which hope structures and sustains our work across temporal frames and distinct modes of academic practice. This chapter develops a hopeful analysis of lineage, memory and resistance, reflecting on my participatory research with the Tamil community in London, and reflects on the revival of utopian thought in criminological scholarship. Hopeful imaginaries of an abolitionist future inform my scholar-activism with Reclaim Holloway – an abolitionist collective formed to influence the redevelopment of the Holloway prison site. I describe this future-oriented work before considering hope as a practice in the present, focusing on ‘pedagogies of hope’ as activist criminology in the classroom

Nationalistic Authorship and Resistance: Performative Politics in Post-war Northeastern Sri Lanka

This chapter traces the promotion and production of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, and examines the state's mass ritual discourse and militaristic spectacle since the triumph of the state forces over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). It analyses the state's institutionalisation of the 'national story' in the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC), the state's post-conflict reconciliation mechanism, which issued its final report in 2010. The chapter focuses on the Rajapaksa government's post-war effort to generate political capital by authoring the military victory as a continuation of Sinhala Buddhist mytho-history. The authorship of space is examined here as part of state's post-war nation building strategy, a continuation of an historical process of Sinhala Buddhist revival under colonialism and post-independence. Local activists further describe their strategies of resistance as including internationalisation of the issue through conferences, such as a 2014 conference in London hosted by the British Tamil Forum (BTF), and engagement with the United Nations including lobbying and submitting information

Detainee Abuse at Abu Ghraib: Sadism or Scapegoating? The Institutional and Discursive Support for Torture in the War on Terror

This article analyses the reports of various military and intelligence institutions in the United States in response to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal which destroyed the reputation of the armed forces in the Iraqi theatre of war in 2004. The photographs delegitimised the mission and provoked strong reaction from the occupied Iraqis. The reports attributed culpability for the abuses perpetrated on the imprisoned Iraqis to 'sadistic' and criminal soldiers and deflected responsibility from senior members of the military and the decay within the institution itself, brought on by the discourse of terror and the introduction of techniques amounting to torture. This article, taking Abu Ghraib and the avoidance of responsibility for atrocity as an example, seeks to comment on the presumed limitations imposed on the applicability of international law during the 'War on Terror', the brutality of the military as an institution and the resulting alterations in the mind-set of individuals by inherent dehumanisation of the enemyin conflict

Discourses of Victimisation in Sri Lanka’s Civil War: Collective Memory, Legitimacy and Agency

This article explores the availability of discourses of victimhood to political actors who aim to justify violence and mass atrocity in the name of those victims. Arguing that the label of the ‘victim’ is equally available for distortion and political capitalization as the label of the ‘criminal’ or the ‘terrorist’, this article reflects on the role of the victim in violence and processes of criminalization. Examining the rhetorical tendencies and strategies of both the state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan civil war, this article describes how the victim was categorized by both sides. This article argues that these categorizations, which simultaneously draw on respective collective memories of victimization are crucial to the manner in which the state’s purported process of post-war ‘reconciliation’ is created and politicized and how victims are included in such a process. Interrogating the post-war landscape of militarization and repression in the country’s Tamil-dominated Northeast, this article also examines new configurations of Tamil victim discourses and their potential as a tool of political agency