Through a close reading of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the article studies the specific ways in which Karunatilaka translates his “being-for the Other” into negotiating his narrative ethics of the 1980s Sri Lankan conflict. Drawing from Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, the study analyzes the narrative strategies of prosthetic memory formation that aid in the suturing of a contingent necropolitical narrative. A study of how photographic techniques and indexical reading of the corpse, along with the politics of the pose, render textual invitations to embodied identification with Maali’s sensory alterity through scopic visuality signifiers. Karunatilaka disrupts global expectations of reconciliation narratives by narrating “necropolitics” that implodes the demarcation between what is visible and what is invisible. The study intends to analyze Karunatilaka’s narrative ethics of reconciliation rather than representation of the conflict—an invitation to share the experience of the necropolitical past. Arielle Azoulay’s civil contract of photography, along with Levinasian ethic of the other, are incorporated to foreground the agency of the injured parties to articulate their precarity, culminating in the ultimate act of suturing into the necropolitical experience of war and violence.
Ajit et al. (Fri,) studied this question.