From memory to a re-imagining; learning from Sivanandan

Abstract

This personal account of what Sivanandan’s writing – particularly his novel When Memory Dies – means to one Sri Lankan Tamil writer from the diaspora shows how his imaginative melding of history, politics and individual lives speaks to the issues facing Third World and ‘subaltern’ poets, intellectuals and novelists today. Through Sivanandan’s work, and an exploration of the significance of the interplay of the personal and the political, the author focuses on how to make radical art in a neoliberal globalist world. This was originally delivered as a talk at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50).