WP348 Living with the chronotope of war: Sri Lankan Tamil diasporans in London

‘Are chronotopes helpful’, asked Jan Blommaert. This chapter answers affirmatively, but uses the concept differently from Blommaert, centring its analysis on the difficulties that Sri Lankan Tamils in London experience in talking about the Sri Lankan civil war. It focuses on two young men, one who had grown up in Sri Lanka during the conflict and the other who had come to the UK from mainland Europe and now had close friends involved in London Tamil gangs.  Treating the backdrop of the war as a ‘chronotope’, which we define as the world imagined over the horizon beyond the focal figures, scenes and events in a story or report, the chapter considers the different ways in which these young men approached the topic of the civil war in interviews with another member of their community, and it points to two rather different discursive strategies. For one of the informants, the relations and practices of war carried over to London, and this ‘cross-chronotopic alignment’ made much of his experience untellable. In this absence of narrative particularisation, the chronotope loomed large, imbuing his talk with the qualities of sociological generalisation. For the other, first-hand experience of wartime conditions provided for a host of vivid and often comic tales that resisted the typifications with which the civil war chronotope is usually associated. The chapter concludes by distinguishing ‘chronotope’ from other sociolinguistic concepts, insisting that it is ‘context at its largest’.  In addition, it suggests that the discursive salience of chronotopes is likely to increase in periods of geopolitical upheaval, together with the quest for detail about the lived experiences that chronotopes encompass.