We are delighted to invite you to the upcoming AFRASO Film Screening and Lecture in cooperation with the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform: "Indian Ocean Memories and African Migrants" by Shihan de Silva (University of London).
The film screening and lecture will take place on June, 13th in room CAS 1.801 (Casino, Campus Westend) from 12 pm - 2 pm.
This lecture concerns the easterly movement of Africans both voluntary and involuntary. The better known westwards migration tends to colour the perceptions of the easterly movement. Archival sources together with narratives of the diasporists can contribute to recovering the lost past. Memories of the diasporists will be illustrated through a film entitled "Indian Ocean Memories and African Migrants", produced and directed by Dr Shihan de Silva in which she explores the cultural memories of the largest Afro-Sri Lankan community.
Dances and songs in creolised Portuguese, a language of trade and commerce for 350 years in Sri Lanka, connect Afro-Sri Lankans to Africa, no longer an imagined homeland. Africans were prominent in the Indian Ocean World in various spheres but the majority of Afro-Asians have been pushed to the margins due to political changes and loss of patronage. Performing traditional art forms enable Afro-Sri Lankans to carve out a niche in the cultural arena of their hostland. Fading memories of slavery and the slave trade can still be heard in the narratives of their oral histories. They rekindle in East-West trade and colonial interventions in the Indian Ocean.
Dr Shihan de Silva Jayasuriya is a Senior Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London), a member of the UNESCO International Scientific Committee (Paris) and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society (Great Britain & Ireland). She has a PhD (Linguistics), an MSc (Finance) and a BSc Honours (Economics) from the University of London. She is the author of eighty five peer-reviewed articles in international journals, and has also written eight books in the fields of Historical Linguistics, Ethnomusicology, Portuguese Studies, African Diaspora Studies and Ethnography. Among her publications are ‘The Portuguese in the East : A Cultural History of a Maritime Trading Empire’ (I B Tauris, London), ‘African Identity in Asia: Cultural Effects of Forced Migration’ (Markus Wiener, New Jersey) and 'The African diaspora in Asian trade routes and cultural memories' (Edwin Mellen Press, 2010). Shihan serves on the editorial boards of African Diaspora and Transnationalism (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers) and African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (California: Left Coast Press).
