Haunting memories: Sri Lankan civil war, trauma and diaspora in literature and film

The article is concerned with the recent literary and cinematographic representation of the Sri Lankan civil war - one of the most gruesome and violent conflicts in the history of contemporary South Asia. It analyses Sri Lankan - American author's V. V. Ganeshananthan's novel Love Marriage and French filmmaker's Jaques Audiard's film Dheepan. The aim of this article is to investigate how two forms of different cultural production (a novel and a film) hailing from different cultural backgrounds and experiences, explore and discuss the traumatic legacies of Sri Lankan civil war in the diasporic space. The article argues that the novel and the film function as trauma narratives which insist on the haunting quality of war-related memories and experiences, emphasising trauma's transnational and transhistorical aspect since it continues possessing its subjects no matter of where they come from or where they are born.