Towards a Sri Lankan Future: Interethnicity and Homosexuality in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy

Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel, Funny Boy, set before the Civil War, alludes to two complicated issues in Sri Lanka pertaining to the burgeoning interethnic conflict and the stigmatization of homosexual practices and behavior. Though it has been three decades since the novel’s publication and the Civil War has ended, the two issues persist. In addressing them, this paper, firstly, establishes colonialism as the reason for these issues and links them in a continuum with the Sri Lankan state; secondly, to overcome these issues and envision a Sri Lankan future, this paper employs a metapolitical reading of the novel through the lens of Badiou’s emancipatory politics. Thus, this paper connects the Sri Lankan past with the present to offer a future premised on the logic of universal emancipation. Additionally, the notion of colonial tropicality, which is intertwined with colonial legacies that presuppose tropical states as incapable of stable governance (which is then historically legitimized by interethnic conflict and civil war), is disproven as the engendered future offers a state with a vision of universal emancipation at its core.