Literary-Public Entanglements in Postcolonial Sri Lanka: Challenges, Possibilities, and Potentialities

Abstract This essay traces the emergence of a linguistically and culturally bifurcated public literary-cultural sphere in Sri Lanka from the early twentieth century to the postcolonial present. It looks at key “moments” in the history of literary-cultural public discourse and argues that different visions of what a Sri Lankan identity could be jostled for influence. However, the colonial political economy under which this literary-cultural sphere developed, and the ensuing majoritarian political developments in post-independence Sri Lanka, overdetermined the linguistically and culturally segregated “form” this literary-public sphere eventually developed. Through the critical exploration of this history, this essay demonstrates that the literary and the political imaginations reproduce each other and that the literary-cultural public sphere is best understood as a contingent space shaped by ideological and political forces that can be both progressive and regressive rather than a normatively progressive or “open” space of public engagement.