Disaster Writing in Minoli Salgado's A Little Dust on the Eyes

This article focuses on Sri Lankan writer, Minoli Salgado's A Little Dust on the Eyes (2014) as a novel that interrogates the media narratives of natural disasters in postcolonial contexts. Countering the colonialist ideological production of space in the media depictions of natural disasters, I explore how Salgado's novel historicizes the tsunami and explores its imbrication within a compound landscape of political, economic, and natural disasters that plagued postcolonial Sri Lanka from the 1980s onwards. Drawing on Naomi Klein's linkage of a series of disparate landscapes of trauma through the concept of the "disaster capitalism complex," I analyze Salgado's novel's engagement with "disaster capitalism" as it moves into the scattered scenes of natural wreckage to flatten preexisting structures and modes of being, undermining the rights of local communities to their land and livelihood.