Two Gonville & Caius College postgraduate students discuss the political crisis in their native Sri Lanka in a podcast which followed coincidental and near-simultaneous submission of academic articles to the History Workshop Journal.
In this History Workshop Podcast, Samal Hemachandra (History PhD 2024) and Andi Schubert (History PhD 2022) along with the other author, Lara Wijesuriya, discuss how understandings of history are responding to major changes taking place in Sri Lanka including the 2022 economic crisis, the protests that resulted, and the recent electoral victory of a new government in September and November 2024.
To listen to the podcast, visit Writing History in Sri Lanka Now by History Workshop Podcast
The below is from the History Workshop Project:
In April 2022, Sri Lanka erupted in political crisis as millions of its citizens across the social spectrum took to the streets demanding justice, democracy, and systemic change. Ultimately those protests toppled a government for the first time in the country’s history, with the cabinet and Prime Minister resigning in May and the President two months after that.
The roots and reverberations of those upheavals – the 2022 People’s Struggle, or Aragalaya – were the subject of a special feature in spring 2024 in issue 97 of History Workshop Journal. It was a feature that emerged out of complete serendipity, from the coincidental, near-simultaneous submission of three entirely separate articles: Historical Vistas on Sri Lanka’s 2022 People’s Uprising by Samal Hemachandra and Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Go Home Banda’: Sri Lanka, Statue Politics, and the 2022 Protests by Lara Wijesuriya, and Restless Somnambulists: Reflections on Violence, Accountability, and Historical Practice from Sri Lanka by Andi Schubert. While the pieces had very dissimilar arguments, they shared a focus on certain key questions: about historical memory in the face of violence, about the persistence of historical traumas, about the possibilities and limits of scholarly inquiry in struggles for accountability, justice, and change.
Read the papers in History Workshop Journal, Volume 97
