Godamunne Vichitra, Abdeen Azhar Jainul, Zoysa Rapti Siriwardane-de
Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Rural Economic and Community Development Organization (RECDO), Kantale, Sri Lanka.
Marit Stud. 2022;21(2):209-221. doi: 10.1007/s40152-022-00262-5. Epub 2022 Mar 10.
This paper explores COVID-19 pandemic biopolitics in Sri Lanka through tropes of "islanding" and segregation by discussing how notions of island isolation, insularity, and geo-spatial boundedness have been transformed from their colonial origins to our post-colonial present, and in the wake of wartime governance. We engage with interlocking notions of the "pandemic island" and the "islanding" of a zoonotic virus with which to broaden relational thinking on local pandemic realities. We argue that the pandemic has tacitly shaped imaginaries of oceanic "islandness" in contemporary times by focusing on five interrelated island(ed) tropes in the humanities and interpretive social sciences against the context of the pandemic. These include the carceral (fortressed) island, the utopic island, the "urban" island, the illicit island, and the mythologised (cursed) island. This paper further contributes toward an understanding of contemporary islands and island imaginaries, an understudied dimension of pandemic-related land-sea sociality.
本文通过“岛屿化”和隔离的比喻来探讨斯里兰卡的新冠疫情生物政治学，讨论岛屿隔离、与世隔绝和地理空间界限的概念是如何从殖民起源转变到我们的后殖民时代，以及在战时治理之后的情况。我们探讨了“大流行岛屿”和人畜共患病毒“岛屿化”的相互关联概念，以此拓宽对当地疫情现实的关系性思考。我们认为，疫情通过关注人文和解释性社会科学中五个相互关联的岛屿（化）比喻，在当代潜移默化地塑造了海洋“岛屿性”的想象，这些比喻是在疫情背景下产生的。其中包括监狱（堡垒）岛、乌托邦岛、“城市”岛、非法岛和神话化（被诅咒）岛。本文进一步有助于理解当代岛屿和岛屿想象，这是与疫情相关的陆海社会性中一个研究不足的维度。
