Nalin Asoka Jayasena

Education

• Ph.D., English, University of California at Riverside
• M.A., English, University of California at Riverside
• B.A., English, University of California at Riverside

Teaching Interests

• Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures of South Asia
• Postwar British Literature
• Postcolonial British Literature
• British Imperial Literature

Research Interests

• British Literature
• South Asian literature and its diaspora

Selected Publications

• “‘Like Making Love to God’: The Politics of Intimacy in Vimukthi Jayasundara’s The Forsaken Land.” South Asian Popular Culture (2012).
• “Where Have All the Tamils Gone? Ethnicity and the Body in the Films of Prasanna Vithanage.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 27:2, 121-132, 2010.
• Contested Masculinities: Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray. New York: Routledge, January 2007.
• “Clubs and Concubines: Imperial Masculinity in George Orwell’s Burmese Days.” Under consideration for publication in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.
• “Desire and the Buddhist Doctrine of Renunciation in Martin Wickramasinghe’sViragaya” in Navasilu: Journal of the English Association of Sri Lanka (18).
• Review of Ranjini Obeyesekere’s Sri Lankan Theater in a Time of Terror in The Journal of Asian Studies 59:2 (July 2000)
• Review of Shyam Selvadurai’s Cinnamon Gardens in World Literature Today 73:4 (Autumn 1999)

Works Under Review

• “Under Indian Eyes: Gendered Geopolitics in the Sri Lankan Armed Conflict.”Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media.
• “Beyond (Post)Colonial Binaries: Meera Syal’s Anita and Me.” South Asian Review.

Work in Progress

My current project The Bounty of War: Cinema and the Sri Lankan Conflict is an in-depth study of cinematic representations of the recently concluded civil war in Sri Lanka between the ethnic Tamils, who were fighting for a separate state, and the Sinhala-majority government. Advancing the foundational work of Neloufer de Mel and Qadri Ismail on the armed conflict in Sri Lanka, my book will focus largely on the ways in which cinema has become a critical mode of representation of one of the longest military conflicts in Asia, not only for Sinhala filmmakers, whose work form the bulk of this project, but also for Tamil filmmakers and those living in the Sri Lankan diaspora. This project is a study of a national conflict located within a transnational framework; it begins with Sri Lankan national cinema but extends into the regional and diasporic realms of filmmaking, which underscores the transnational nature of modern cultural production and also of political conflict itself.

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