Deborah Marianne Philip

EMAILED: This ethnographic and historical project investigates the politics of home and unhomeliness in colonial and post-colonial Sri Lanka. While scholarship on Sri Lanka examines belonging and displacement through war, violence, and nation-state formations, this study centers the Burghers, a mixed-race minority that claims Portuguese and Dutch ancestry, to shift the scholarly gaze from belonging defined by nation and nationalism to the long durée of home and unhomeliness across time and space. Over 12 months, from 2022-2023 I conducted interviews, participant observation and archival and historical research in the coastal cities of Colombo and Batticaloa. Tracing the relationship between race, temporality and home, I argue that situating this community through conceptualizations of ‘home’, produces an uncanny imaginary of home and belonging outside normative anti-colonial and nation-state nationalism. ‘Home’ is a useful heuristic term and analytical category to rethink how that which is familiar, can be deeply unfamiliar and unhomely, evoking loss, abandonment and haunting. Burgher struggles reveal an unhomeliness in their present, and pre-occupations with home as a future-past and future-oriented project. Uncanny remnants of empire, the Burghers reflect how ‘home’ can be an impossibility and a necessity for the subject’s future, one never gets there but is always getting there.