Postcolonial geographies of privilege: diaspora space, the politics of personhood and the 'Sri Lankan Women's Association in the UK'

ABSTRACT

This paper explores diaspora spatialities infrequently evoked within postcolonial geography: those of early twentieth-century South Asian migrants to Britain who occupied privileged positions of class and status in their countries of origin. Specifically, I explore the collective practices of members of a London-based, upper middle-class/elite Sri Lankan women's association, formed in 1949. By closely exploring the group's historically contingent social practices, the paper evokes a problematic set of postcolonial geographies. Members' performative expression of feminized and respectable modes of Sri Lankan-ness, underpinned by the 'trusteeship' that characterized Ceylon's late colonial relationship with Britain and familiar to them from their privileged backgrounds, have cultivated spatialities that remain imbued with colonial ideology. In this diaspora space, dimensions of late colonial modernity continue to problematically shape members' subjectivities and social relations amidst an expanding Sri Lankan community in London. This paper shows how the Association's ongoing performance of late colonial, privileged and elite modes of Sri Lankan-ness has (re)produced space for the possibility of the negotiation of a politics of personhood for women whose bodies were racially and sexually marked as outside in post-imperial London. The paper contributes a better understanding of the wide range of postcolonial formations that occur in variable ways and distinct settings.