Historical Vistas on Sri Lanka’s 2022 People’s Uprising

Abstract

Written in close proximity to Sri Lanka’s 2022 people’s uprising, this is a conversation between two historians, one from the University of Colombo and the other from the University of Cambridge, about the long roots of violence in Sri Lankan society. It is an account of the lived experience of violence on 9 May 2022, which was a defining event of the uprising. What occurred on this date is cast here within various alternative historical itineraries. The article experiments with groundedness and time travel; it acknowledges the positionality of the authors, creating a solidarity across borders. This approach responds to critiques of the political naivety and colonialist methodology of empiricist history, making history of political use and public value once again.