Abstract
ABSTRACTA senior editor of TamilNet.com, a Tamil nationalist news portal that focuses on political affairs pertaining to Tamils from the South Asian island of Sri Lanka, had observed that one of the functions of the website was ‘counter-counterinsurgency’. This paper explores how, in the aftermath of the end of the military conflict in Sri Lanka between the state and the Tamil nationalist insurgency led by the Tamil Tigers in May 2009, TamilNet has projected through its news coverage and editorials a political discourse of ‘Eelam Tamil’ nationalism as a counter to the narratives of dominant discourses around Sri Lanka’s politics. This paper takes into consideration the emphasis that counterinsurgency places on tapping alternate micronarratives to diffuse the political struggle of the population it wants to domesticate, further explaining how TamilNet strategically creates a metanarrative of an ‘anti-establishment’ Tamil nationalism to prevent the dilution of the demand of Eelam Tamil national self-determination. The paper concludes that the virtual space as a zone of information warfare compels counter-media like TamilNet to construct metanarratives from below to contest hegemonic narratives from above.
Published Version
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