‘We are Ceylon Africans!’: Africana Culture, Politics, and Identity in Sri Lanka"

FAIN: FT-291876-23

Sureshi M. Jayawardene
San Diego State University (San Diego, CA 92182-0001)

Research and writing for a historical and ethnographic study of the Ceylon African community in Sri Lanka.

My book, “We are Ceylon Africans!”: Africana Culture, Politics, and Identity in Sri Lanka, centers the contemporary epistemologies of Ceylon Africans—a highly understudied, generations-long African-descended community in Sri Lanka. The first mixed-method study by a Black Studies scholar, my book contributes a unique analysis to the growing body of scholarship on the western Indian Ocean African diaspora, expanding the regional examination of Afrodiasporic peoples in South Asia. Ceylon African entry to Sri Lankan society is framed by slavery and the militarism of the colonial project, beginning with the Portuguese in the 16th century. My book employs my interdisciplinary training in Black Studies combining ethnographic fieldwork in Puttalam, Sri Lanka, archival research, close reading, and visual anthropology to analyze the pluralities of Ceylon African epistemologies within the overlapping historical regimes of colonization and slavery.