Scripted Heritage in Improvised Spaces-Tamil School Plays as Mnemonic Socialisation and Placemaking in Diaspora
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2145244 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Orly Orbach (Goldsmiths University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 35 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-32 |
| Publication date | 2025-05-27 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropological Forum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0066-4677 • E-ISSN: 1469-2902 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/00664677.2025.2484396 |
| OpenAlex | W4410838145 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 42 |
On makeshift stages across London, students from a Tamil Saturday school reenact myths and stories from Sri Lanka. Based on multi-sited ethnographic research across the city, I show how these school plays move difficult and painful cultural memories from the edge of visibility into the public realm. Performed at the Museum of London, Trafalgar Square, temples and the Houses of Parliament, they expand where Tamil cultural heritage belongs. The plays reveal how memories suppressed in Sri Lanka find new public articulations in the UK. The article considers the difficulties of sharing memories of violence with children as an aesthetic and pedagogical problem (Daniel 1996, Jeganathan 2020). As expressions of postmemory in migration, school plays offer oblique forms of remembering violent pasts remotely. Through carefully worded scripts devised by their parents, the plays provide a reflective and embodied process by which children become custodians of their cultural heritage, transforming intergenerational memories of collective trauma into meaningful lessons that enable young people to act in this world
Archaeology · Art · Diaspora · Media studies · Mnemonic · Placemaking · Sociology · Tamil · Anthropology · Architecture · Gender Studies · History · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Psychology · South Asian Cinema and Culture · Theatre and Performance Studies
Archaeology and Social Memory
Homes and Exiles
Performance
Art And Agency
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning
Memorylands
Exhibiting cultures
Wisdom sits in places
Performance Studies
Migrating heritage
Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory
Migrant Belongings
Sacralising the city
Performing for the gods? Dance and embodied ritual in British Hindu temples
Territorial spaces and national identities
Handbook of Landscape Archaeology
Because tumi Bangali
Ludic Heritage
Understanding 'ethnocratic' regimes
Museums in a time of migration
Learning at the museum frontiers
Inscribing the victor's land
The Generation of Postmemory
Between Memory and History
Embodied Migration
Only Man Is Vile
The Ritual Process
Europe, Blurred
Charred Lullabies
Absence in technicolour
Spaces and Places of Black Educational Desire
Semiotics and the social analysis of material things
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |