History and Imagination: Tamil Culture in the Global Context

Cultural Writing. Essays. Literary Criticism. Asian Studies. Edited by R. Cheran, Darshan Ambalavanar and Chelva Kanaganayakam. Tamils, originating in South India and Sri Lanka, constitute a large part of the diasporic South Asians in Canada, as well as the United States, Australia, and Europe. Many of them have fled the civil war in Sri Lanka. This rupture in the physical and imaginative landscape of the Tamils is undoubtedly reflected in their cultural production and has led to a renewal of their traditional aesthetics, which, in the words of the editors, "no longer adequately [capture] the richness or complexity of Tamil social and creative experience." This collection covers a broad range of topics relating to Tamil culture in the world, all of them examining the ancient traditional aesthetics and how they relate to a layered modern reality. This book is therefore of special relevance to the concerns of multiculturalism and globalization.

R Cheran teaches in the Department of Sociology and Antrhopology at the University of Winsor

Darshan Ambalavanar has a doctoral destree in religious studies from Harvard University.

Chelva Kanaganayakam teaches in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.