Consuming conflict as Tamil consciousness: the case of second-generation British Sri Lankan Tamils

Abstract

A long-running conflict is wounding for generations, not only by sustaining an affective sense-making between different geolocations but also by binding diasporic communities through the conflict’s temporality of pain, violence and loss as enduring legacies. Long-running conflicts leave wounds, binding generations through an allotropic process in which the trauma is experienced second-hand and consumed through the circulation of the conflict in a myriad of cultural forms. This paper reveals the findings of a study conducted among second-generation British Sri Lankan youths to understand conflict as a site of constant consumption and domestication, yielding an affective sphere of sense making. In particular, the paper traces how the consumption of conflict is reified and temporally enlarged through the interactions between first and second generations, transnational networks and peers as well as media technologies in mediating Tamil identity and consciousness. This affective sphere induced through second-hand trauma is continuously sustained, renewed and negotiated in lending to the process of identity construction and the moral imagination of a homeland.