Overview

This text traces the history of Tamil migration, from the economic migrants of the 1960s onwards. The author draws unnerving parallels between the status of the Tamil community in Sri Lanka, as a persecuted minority waging a war of liberation, and the migrant community in Norway as a displaced, marginalized and excluded refugee community, with only tenuous links to the ""host country"" and a fierce but often contradictory attachment to revolutionary politics and to Tamil customs and rituals. The text argues that in the process of displacement, aspects of Tamil culture, such as marriage, dowry, chastity and ritual, acquire a heightened significance: tradition in exile is bound up in the violent struggle for independence in Sri Lanka. The contradictions which characterise the Tamil refugee communities, and the success of revolutionary Tamil nationalism in exile, highlight the transnational nature of identity politics and demonstrate why the attempts by the state to integrate these communities are perhaps likely to end in failure. For the Tamils, displacement is not so much a question of geography as a state of mind.

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9780745314334

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Reviews

This is an important contribution to migration research -- Choice (This book) engages questions central to the study of transnationalism and also enhances our understanding of the Tamil struggle in contemporary Sri Lanka. Fuglerud gracefully moves between analyses of local refugee formations in Norway, nationalist subjects back home and historical narrative; he takes seriously the reach of this ethnic diaspora and breaks down facile divisions between homeland and land settlement. This theoretically sophisticated book should be of interest to a wide range of scholars. It transforms our understanding of what it means to be a refugee-immigrant and innovatively demonstrates how ethnic-national conflicts are constructed at home through their translation abroad. -- International Migration Review

Author Information

Oivind Fuglerud is a former Red Cross worker in the NGO/voluntary sector and now an academic researcher in Oslo.

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