Nationalism and production of precarious life: an anarchist critique of Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Abstract

Following Anarchist theorist Rudolf Rocker, the current paper strives to see the role of state racism in perpetrating violence as depicted in Island of a Thousand Mirrors by Nayomi Munaveera. The paper argues that state racism by majoritarian Sinhala elite defines a reductive notion of nationalism which inseminates genocidal violence against the minority community. This nationalism, providing normative definition of human dictates which lives are considered worthy and must be protected by bringing all apparatuses of state in action and which lives must be subjected to extinction by using the monopoly of state violence. The paper further intends to seek the nexus between nationalism and the patterns that it devises to subject ethnic minorities’ lives to precariousness. It further seeks to explore that the retributory forces replicate instead of eradicating violence. The paper further argues that nationalism not only defines worthy lives, it, also, provides a cultural frame for defining grievable death thus subjecting minorities to the violence of derealisation.