What is the role of cultural authenticity in the making of nations? Much scholarly and popular commentary on nationalism dismisses authenticity as a romantic fantasy or, worse, a deliberately constructed mythology used for political manipulation. The Politics and Poetics of Authenticity places authenticity at the heart of Sinhala nationalism in late nineteenth and twentieth-century Sri Lanka. I…
On 26 December 2004 at 6.58 hours (Sri Lanka Time), a massive earthquake with its epicentre outside the coast of Sumatra generated a series of gigantic waves, tsunamis. At 8.35 hours the waves reached the eastern and southern coastline of Sri Lanka, crushing hundreds of villages and towns, killing and maiming tens of thousands of people within seconds. When the waves pulled back, and the ocean …