Sri Lanka

Perera, S.W.

doi:10.1177/002198940103600308

Cited by 1 publication

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“…Indeed, Funny Boy can be situated within a variety of literary and cultural contexts, including North American gay men's literature (see Bergman, 1991Lilly, 1993, or contemporary Canadian literature (see Maufort & Bellarsi, 2002), for example. However, this paper chooses to situate Funny Boy-and this reading of the novel-within the field of Sri Lankan literary production, an increasing portion of which is written overseas (see Perera, 2001Perera, , 2002.…”

Section: Fictive Geographies: Reading Spatiallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai'sFunny Boy

Jazeel¹

2005

Gender, Place & Culture

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This article explores the ways that the popular diasporic novel Funny Boy, set in Sri Lanka but written from Canada by an exiled Sri Lankan born Tamil, intervenes in the country's contemporary geographies of difference. The novel itself explores a Tamil boy's struggle to negotiate life in Sinhala-dominated Colombo while also coming to terms with his emergent same-sex desire. By focusing specifically on the writing of two familiar middle-class Sri Lankan spaces central to the novel's narrative-the family home and the school-the article shows how these everyday geographies regulate and normalise carnal desire in a society which still operates anti-homosexual legislation. It also suggests how the erosion of the meanings of these familiar spaces is a tactic central to the main protagonist's sexual liberation. By reading these sexualised geographies through the polemic racialised Sinhala/Tamil divisions in contemporary Sri Lankan society, the paper shows how the novel makes an important political intervention in contemporary Sri Lankan politics where devolution and federal solutions to recent civil unrest have produced territorialised geographies of difference that prescribe 'places for races'. By evoking the Funny Boy's fictive and sexualised geographies of exclusion and resistance, this article unsettles the logic that binds intra-racial solidarity, its cognate geographical modelling, and instead highlights the exclusions that exist at all levels in Sri Lankan society.

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Section: Fictive Geographies: Reading Spatiallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai'sFunny Boy

Jazeel¹

2005

Gender, Place & Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Sri Lanka

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai'sFunny Boy

Because Pigs Can Fly: Sexuality, race and the geographies of difference in Shyam Selvadurai'sFunny Boy

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