Shored curfews: Constructions of pandemic islandness in contemporary Sri Lanka

Abstract

This paper explores COVID-19 pandemic biopolitics in Sri Lanka through tropes of “islanding” and segregation by discussing how notions of island isolation, insularity, and geo-spatial boundedness have been transformed from their colonial origins to our post-colonial present, and in the wake of wartime governance. We engage with interlocking notions of the “pandemic island” and the “islanding” of a zoonotic virus with which to broaden relational thinking on local pandemic realities. We argue that the pandemic has tacitly shaped imaginaries of oceanic “islandness” in contemporary times by focusing on five interrelated island(ed) tropes in the humanities and interpretive social sciences against the context of the pandemic. These include the carceral (fortressed) island, the utopic island, the “urban” island, the illicit island, and the mythologised (cursed) island. This paper further contributes toward an understanding of contemporary islands and island imaginaries, an understudied dimension of pandemic-related land-sea sociality.