Survival Media: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility and the War in Sri Lanka: Mobility & Politics

Abbreviations
Series Editor's Foreword
In Lieu of...
Preface: The Location of the Aftermath
Introduction: Lethal Imaginaries of Nationalism: A Brief History in Checkpoints
1. Lines of Flight: Survival Media
2. Missing In Action: By All Media Necessary
3. White Shores of Longing: Castaway Stories and Nation Dramas
4. Accounting For Disposable Lives: Visibility, Atrocity and International Justice
5. Territory of Ashes: A Disjointed Unfolding
Conclusion: 'From what has happened to what will come'
Afterword
Bibliography

"Words of poets . . . sounds, images draw lines of flight . . . opening new angles on diaspora studies as well as on the politics of borders and mobility." - Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna, Italy

"A remarkable work of scholarship . . . beautifully written; makes a highly original and ethical argument that deserves the widest dissemination." - Sankaran Krishna, University of Hawai?i at Manoa, USA

"With poetic prose and keen analysis, the book shows us that the refugee and migrant are not only mobile subjects; tracing their fraught passage also complicates, disorients and troubles the question of the subject itself . . . [T]he subject struggles for shore, then slips from view, only to remerge; each time constituted by and struggling with trajectories of power and knowledge that are both new and not." - Vasuki Nesiah, New York University, USA

Suvendrini Perera is Professor of Cultural Analysis at Curtin University, Australia. Her previous books include Reaches of Empire: The English Novel from Edgeworth to Dickens and Australia and the Insular Imagination: Beaches, Borders, Boats and Bodies. Her most recent publication is the coedited volume At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror (with Sherene Razack).

Drawing on a variety of expressive forms and acts - the movements of refugee boats, the poetics of hip-hop, narratives of atrocity and survival - this book develops the concept of 'survival media' though the stories and mobilities of the thirty-year war in Sri Lanka. Moving between the hip-hop of M.I.A. and Human Rights reports, satellite maps and survivor testimonies, it shows how this war in a small country is also enmeshed with critical global issues such as the effects of the war on terror, the formations of diasporic identities and the hardening politics of borders.