Browsing by Author "Manuratne, P."

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Colonizing Gender: Literary Representations of the Impact of Colonialism on Gender in Native American Societies
(University of Kelaniya, 2007) Manuratne, P.
The history of Native and first nation people of North America is a history of exploitation, destruction and genocide. Colonialism has functioned in multiple ways to exploit Native resources and land, and has in the process, transformed Native cultures in irreparable ways. While economic exploitation, administrative regulation, and cultural genocide in colonial America are intimately linked, gender is an important area in which all three intersect in significant ways. The aim of colonial oppression remains relatively homogenous irrespective of its geographic location-exploiting the colonized society and its resources. However, colonial oppression takes significantly different forms in different colonial contexts. Thus, it is necessary to look at ways in which gender in Native American cultures was regulated by the colonizing culture and how these colonial practices have transformed the Native American cultures. This paper examines four aspects of gender regulation by the colonial process in Native American .societies. Drawing on the research by Bonita Lawrence, Tsianina K Lomawaima, Lisa J Udel, and Quincy 0 Newell, I examine how colonial practices transform gender relations in the colonized cultures. The classification of Indians, the establishment of boarding schools, the emergence of Motherwork as a political category, and the effect of the contact between 1 alive Americans of California and early Spanish missions are four aspects of gender and gender regulation discussed by these authors. 1 examine literary and theoretical texts by Native American writers within the context provided by these writers to argue that colonialism transforms gender relations in colonized countries and attempts to hegemonize colonial gender categorizations and unequal gender relations within the colonized cultures.
Forms of Belonging and the Ethics of Betrayal in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose
(University of Kelaniya, 2015) Manuratne, P.
This paper examines how Etel Adnan’s novel Sitt Marie Rose challenges the biopolitical implications of belonging to the nation via the circumstances of natality. Giorgio Agamben argues that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen (1789) was a key moment at which “natality” itself became a principle of belonging, which, through the fact of birth, defined the “inalienable” right of man (Agamben 1995). The fact that it is through birth (through territorial belonging and/or sanguinity) that one belongs to the nation, for Agamben, turns the very notion of belonging itself into a biopolitical issue. In this paper, I explore how the deliberate choice to renounce such biopolitical definitions of belonging, and the conscious decision to seek other forms of political affiliations, play out within extremely violent situations. In Sitt Marie Rose, the eponymous character undermines this claim to belonging by virtue of natality through her ethical act of betrayal. By deliberately crossing the green line that separates the Christians and the Arabs in Beirut, she transgresses the rule of what the Nazis once called, as Agamben shows, “blut und bloten” (blood and soil) that is at the heart of the fascist thought. In doing so, she forges a new ethic of betrayal by staking her intellectual allegiances within the Palestinian cause, and by declaring her sexual independence through her romantic involvement with her Palestinian lover. The novel dramatizes the profundity of this betrayal in a medieval inquisition-style interrogation that determines the multi-narrator fictional form of the novel. In my paper, I argue that the novel points to the complexities involved in choosing political forms of belonging that are not determined by the pure fact of bare-life, and that such natality-driven forms of political belonging can be challenged through other models of political solidarity, offering a counterpoint to the hegemonic manifestations of biopower.
“My dream has come true”: reconstructing cultural history through women’s narratives of their life histories
(University of Kelaniya, 2008) Manuratne, P.
Narrating madness: The ambiguous narrative voice of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The yellow wallpaper”
(University of Kelaniya, 2009) Manuratne, P.
Strategies of Reconciliation through Education and Research
(Research Centre for Social Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Vitharana, S.; Sumedha, K.; Jayaweera, S.; Manuratne, P.
Postwar Sri Lanka has explored several modes and models of reconciliation as part of its effort to address the deep ethnic divide that still affects the country. Ultra-nationalist groups continue to create discourses and forums that destroy the potential for any sustainable peace among the various ethno-religious groups that were affected by the conflict. Attempts at creating discourses on reconciliation do not always occur at the grassroots level, often employing top-down models that prove unsustainable in the long run. In this research, we theorize a pedagogical exercise in which we participated as lecturers at the University of Kelaniya. A group of Third Year Sociology students were required to conduct a field research as part of their study program. The study involved a field trip to Tirukkovil and Karaitivu in two consecutive years, two Divisional Secretariats in the Eastern Province. The students had to be part of home-stays that involved close cultural contact with the host community. In this paper, we explore how the experience of being part of this research project can be theorized in terms of pedagogical strategies for reconciliation. Drawing on this experience, and the insights of the Freirean model of education, we explore the limits and challenges of traditional modes of delivering information such as lectures and presentations. We argue that informal modes of cultural exchange, operating at the grassroots level, facilitate ethnic reconciliation more effectively than traditional modes of delivery.
A Study on the Use of Online Streaming Media by the Undergraduates of the Faculty of Humanities, University of Kelaniya.
(Faculty of Humanities University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2021) Podduwage, D. Randula; Rathnayake, R.M.P.F.; Manuratne, P.
Recognised as one of the modern techniques in the video industry, Video Streaming refers to the use of online platforms to deliver and view video materials through the internet. People can engage with these videos whenever they want, if they have access to an internet connection. Due to the attractiveness of this new medium of delivering video content, video streaming has become a popular mode of entertainment and sharing information, resulting in a relatively low use of traditional media such as television in the contemporary society. Thousands of video materials are uploaded to the internet within a minute, some of which garner millions of views. Studies have been carried out that focus on such aspects in an international level, which points to the general lack of research that explores the ways in which online video materials can be used within the Sri Lankan context. Therefore, the effects of using streaming media on a national level remains a research area that needs to be explored. In its attempt to address this research gap, the present study is focused on understanding the use of online streaming medium by the undergraduates of the Sri Lankan universities in their day-to-day life. Data for the study (both quantitative and qualitative) are gathered by distributing a Questionnaire and conducting interviews with the students who were selected from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Kelaniya. By analysing the data gathered through the above research methods this study has concluded that, the undergraduates of the Faculty of Humanities have chosen the streaming media as a means of escaping their hectic schedules and relieving their stress, rather than employing such media for their educational purposes.
“Suspect Belongings”: The Traitor as a Figure of Betrayal in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose
(Women’s Studies, 2022) Manuratne, P.
In The Last Resistance, Jacqueline Rose writes, “As far as nationhood is concerned, flesh and blood – or in Freud’s formula ‘blood and nerves’ is a suspect form of belonging” (22). As fresh cycles of violence erupt with deeper and darker understandings of who belongs where in a world in which vast swathes of people live as stateless or exiled people, the forms of belong- ing to the nation, the group, or the clan have become ever more suspect. In this study, the central figure for this suspect form of belonging is the traitor. I analyze Etel Adnan’s novel, Sitt Marie-Rose (1978), translated into English as Sitt Marie-Rose (1982), to examine how, as a traitor, a woman brings out the tenuousness of group cohesion and belonging in times of war. Etel Adnan is a Lebanese-American poet, painter, and novelist whose work mixes genres, disciplines, and cultural idioms. Sitt Marie-Rose is a fictional account of the real-life story of Marie-Rose Boulus (Adnan, “To Write”). Boulus was a Syrian Christian social worker in Beirut who was abducted and killed by the Christian Militia during the early stages of the Lebanese Civil War. At once martyr and traitor, she gives a body to the political and sexual anxieties associated with the traitor. In this paper, I put Adnan’s novel in conversation with psychoanalysis, drawing on the study of traitors by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly to examine how the figure of the traitor can be gendered. A female traitor’s betrayal destabilizes not only the tenuous lines of group cohesion or national belonging but also the implicit sexual forms of bonding present in such groups. This inner undoing provokes vicious violence: “we do not want to hear the unsettling news that might come from anywhere else. We are never more ruthless than when we are trying to block out parts of our mind” (23), writes Rose. I take the figure of the traitor, in this case the female traitor, as a figure for that inner unsettling of our enchantment with ourselves and our nation. Thus, the novel renders visible the vulnerability and tenuousness of national belonging: Adnan pro- poses a model of love that upsets the fragile but hardened brotherhoods, leading to other solidarities that transcend the love of the same (brother) by introducing sexual difference, the woman, and the traitor (Manuratne 160–219).