Programme
Chelva Kanaganayakam
Professor
Department of English
University of Toronto
E/ ckanagan@chass.utoronto.ca
Poetry and Humanism: After Maranothul Valvom
The paper argues that Maranothul Valvom, published in 1985, marks a turning point in the literary history of Sri Lankan Tamil literature in that it responded quite directly to the growing political uncertainty of the nation. The poetry that comes after this collection reflects a growing awareness of a changing ethos, a social and cultural milieu in which the conventions and values of the past needed to be revisited and reshaped. As notions of space, time, and location changed rapidly, the sense of what it meant to be a person and to inhabit a particular environment underwent significant change. To make this claim is not to suggest that continuities with the past did not exist. In fact, it is the intersection with the past that gives contemporary poetry so much of its power. This paper, then, is about the ways in which post-Maranothul Valvom poetry offers a new sense of what it means to be a Tamil, in Sri Lanka and in the diaspora.
_____
Prof. Kanaganayakam's research interests are in Southeast Asian literature,
contemporary Indian and Sri Lankan writing, literature of exile and postcolonial
theory. His major publications include
Moveable Margins: The Shifting Spaces of Canadian Literature (2005);
Counterrealism and Ingo Anglian Fiction (2002);
Lutesong and Lament: Tamil Writing from Sri Lanka (2001);
Dark Antonyms and Paradise: The Poetry of Rienzi Crusz (1997);
Configurations of Exile: South Asian Writers and Their World
(1995), and
Structures of Negation: The Writings of Zulfikar Ghose (1993).