About Nira Wickramasinghe
Nira Wickramasinghe is a professor in the department of history and international relations, the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Articles by Nira Wickramasinghe
Aimé Césaire: poetry as weapon
"Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge" (Aimé Césaire)
Aimé Césaire died on 17 April 2008 in Fort-de-France on the French Caribbean island of Martinique at the ripe age of 94. His life and political choices are truly captured in his friend and surrealist writer André Breton's words: Césaire was the "prototype of dignity".
Multiculturalism: a view from Sri Lanka
Reading Tariq Modood's article "Multiculturalism, citizenship and national identity" (17 May 2007) led me to reflect on how different the public debate on multiculturalism is in the United Kingdom and in a country such as Sri Lanka where multicultural policies have been grudgingly agreed to in order to answer the need for recognition by groups that have a claim to nationhood and self-determination. If there is as yet no "backlash" of the kind that has evidently occurred in Britain, the reason is that the debate in Sri Lanka is centred elsewhere: not on the merits or otherwise of multiculturalism, but on whether we are or are not a multicultural state at all!






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