Funny Boy, postmemorial potentialities, and the queer diasporic Sri Lankan novel

Abstract

ABSTRACT As the first anglophone novel to foreground queer experiences and memorialize the state-sanctioned 1983 Black July pogrom of Tamils, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy trailblazed a second wave of Sri Lankan American writing. This article examines Selvadurai’s invocation of queer memory as “postmemory” in line with Marianne Hirsch’s theorization to investigate the transgenerational inheritance of violence emanating from colonial discourses of sexuality and ethnonationalism. It illustrates how Funny Boy extends Hirsch’s framework beyond its Eurocentric and heteronormative familial setting. By calling attention to the afterlives of imperialism, Selvadurai posits queer memory as a postscript that supplements the amnesiac postcolonial record. Funny Boy uses the Bildungsroman genre to illustrate how the queer protagonist undermines the colonial value system that casts a long shadow over postcolonial lived experiences. The article argues that the novel proposes a new epistemic way of interrogating Victorian sexuality, patriarchal norms, and Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism in postcolonial Sri Lanka.