Where global discourses meet local realities

Scholarly publishing in the Sinhala language (the language of the numerical majority in Sri Lanka) has "mushroomed" in the recent past. However, this rapid growth - fueled by instrumental professional needs, the mainstreaming of a metrics-based culture in the university system, and neo-liberal discourses about measurable academic productivity - we argue is of little intellectual consequence. We trace a history of how a vibrant Sinhala-language public culture emerged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries within a larger history of decolonization; how this public culture became institutionalized within the postcolonial state from the late 1940s; and how Sinhala language publishing lost its state patronage in the 1980s with neo-liberalization which ironically created space for radical Sinhala-language intellectual debate. We conclude by contrasting this history with the present where Sinhala scholarly publishing has become banal and faces an existential threat from the "return" of English due to neo-liberal market forces

Media studies · Political science · Publishing · Sociology · Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

• A Geopolitics Of Academic Writing

  A Suresh Canagarajah, Suresh Canagarajah•Geopolitics of Academic Writing•2002

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• The language planning situation in Sri Lanka

  Sandagomi Coperahewa•Current Issues in Language Planning•2009

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• Producing anxiety in the neoliberal university

  Open Access•Lawrence D Berg, Edward H Huijbens et al.•Canadian Geographies /…•2016

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• Purifying the Sinhala Language

  Open Access•Sandagomi Coperahewa•Modern Asian Studies•2012

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