Book launch 'Banishment and Belonging' by Ronit Ricci

Lunch will be provided; registration is required.

Organised by the Leiden Centre for Indian Ocean Studies (IIAS; KITLV; Leiden University). 

Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures, maps and memories they evoke. Names that have intersected and overlapped - in a treatise, a poem, a document - only to go their own ways. But despite different trajectories, all three are tied to narratives of banishment and exile. Ronit Ricci suggests that the island served as a concrete exilic site as well as a metaphor for imagining exile across religions, languages, space and time: Sarandib, where Adam was banished from Paradise; Lanka, where Sita languished in captivity; and Ceylon, faraway island of exile for Indonesian royalty under colonialism. Utilising Malay manuscripts and documents from Sri Lanka, Javanese chronicles, and Dutch and British sources, Ricci explores histories and imaginings of displacement related to the island through a study of the Sri Lankan Malays and their connections to an exilic past.

Ronit Ricci holds the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Her research interests include Islamic literary cultures in the Indonesian-Malay world and Sri Lanka, Javanese and Malay manuscript literatures, the history of exile in colonial Asia, and translation studies. She is the author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (2011), editor of Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (2016), and co-editor of Translation in Asia: Theories, Practices, Histories (2011, with Jan van der Putten), and Contentious Belonging: The Place of Minorities in Indonesia (2019, with Greg Fealy).

Registration (required)

Please use the web-form on the right-hand side of this page to register (if you would like us to cater for your lunch, by Monday 9 December, 17:00 hrs.).