A Little Dust on the Eyes
- Submitting institution
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Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 533
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Peepal Tree Press
- ISBN
- 9781845232405
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- October
- Year of publication
- 2014
- URL
-
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- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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A - Manchester Writing School
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- A Little Dust on the Eyes draws on twelve years’ scholarly research on and in Sri Lanka during the civil war. Fieldwork involved interviewing war and tsunami survivors, consultations with journalists, activists and scholars at universities of Colombo, Peradeniya and Kelaniya, and anthropological research in Matara where the novel is set. The book channels traumatic memory drawing on stories documented by Amnesty International, reportage, literary research that informed my study Writing Sri Lanka (2006), video footage, and testimony studies, notably concepts of ethical witnessing developed by Felman and Laub and Patricia Lawrence, and Marianne Hirsch’s formulation of postmemory.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Process:
The novel draws on twelve years’ fieldwork and scholarly research on and in Sri Lanka during the civil war, interviewing war and tsunami survivors, consultations with journalists, activists and scholars at Sri Lankan universities and anthropological research in Matara. As the first novel to draw the war and the South Asian tsunami into historical alignment, the book extends current scriptings of postcolonial witnessing by exploring the navigation of disrupted, suppressed and officially denied memories exploring the links between the aesthetics and ethics of bearing witness. The double narrative presents a dialogic reading of the impact of the war and tsunami by counterpointing insider and outsider perspectives of the resident and returnee in ways that globalise trauma studies.
Insights:
The novel is a work of historiographic metafiction that explores the link between the ethics and aesthetics of bearing witness by probing and crossing the boundary between the sayable and unsayable, the narratable and the non-narratable – concerns that inform the critical work of Patricia Yaegar, Robyn Warhol and Judith Butler. It goes beyond the current call to decolonise trauma studies by deploying a variety of registers that open up new, culturally-grounded ways of articulating silence and suppression.
Dissemination:
Winner of the first SI Leeds Literary Prize for unpublished fiction in 2012, it was published by Peepal Tree Press in 2014, was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016 and was one of twelve novels selected for translation as part of the EU-funded translation project, Echoes of Realities, published in Slovene in 2018. Described by Booker-nominee Romesh Gunesekera as ‘An impressive exploration of traumatic loss, done with delicacy’, its engagement with testimony is part of a wider project on globalising trauma studies that drives the author’s Leverhulme-funded project, and three peer-reviewed critical papers on testimony.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -