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Title details for Dark Tourist by Hasanthika Sirisena - Available

Dark Tourist

by Hasanthika Sirisena
ebook
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"Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection." —Kirkus

"Sirisena explores how stories can become a 'talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another's pain' in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut ... [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into." —Publishers Weekly

Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena's stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father's stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.

Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language's ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.
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Series: 21st Century Essays Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Kindle Book

  • Release date: December 10, 2021

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9780814281697
  • Release date: December 10, 2021

PDF ebook

  • ISBN: 9780814281697
  • File size: 5371 KB
  • Release date: December 10, 2021
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Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
PDF ebook
Kindle restrictions

subjects

Biography & Autobiography Literary Criticism Nonfiction

Languages

English

"Shimmers with honesty, vulnerability, and circumspection." —Kirkus

"Sirisena explores how stories can become a 'talisman against the overwhelming darkness of another's pain' in her emotionally charged nonfiction debut ... [Her] searching spirit leaves readers with plenty to dig into." —Publishers Weekly

Dark tourism—visiting sites of war, violence, and other traumas experienced by others—takes different forms in Hasanthika Sirisena's stunning excavation of the unexpected places (and ways) in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet. The 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father's stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors. A fraught memory of her time as a young art student in Chicago that is uneasily foundational to her bisexual, queer identity today. The ways that life-changing impairments following a severe eye injury have shaped her thinking about disability and self-worth.

Deftly blending reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir, Sirisena pieces together facets of her own sometimes-fractured self to find wider resonances with the human universals of love, sex, family, and art—and with language's ability to both fail and save us. Dark Tourist becomes then about finding a home, if not in the world, at least within the limitless expanse of the page.
Expand title description text
Biography & Autobiography Literary Criticism Nonfiction