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Disenchanted Solidarity? Reflections on Postcolonial Solidarities in a Moment of National and Global Crisis
ABSTRACT In July 2022, Sri Lanka witnessed a spectacular people’s uprising dubbed the aragalaya (“struggle”). People flocked in their hundreds of thousands to the capital Colombo and deposed a sitting executive president. The aragalaya was underwritten by extreme economic precarity and saw an unprecedented form of solidarity that cut across ethnic, class, religious, and other boundaries. However, as in other recent uprisings—such as the Arab Spring or the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong—the aragalaya was short-lived, and conventional politics reasserted itself in the country and unleashed further repression. This paper reflects on Sri Lanka’s aragalaya and similar struggles elsewhere to critically probe different iterations of solidarity and to ask a series of interrelated questions about the ephemeral nature of solidarity, but at the same time to imagine possibilities for more sustained and substantial forms of collective social and political action.
KEYWORDS Aragalaya, people’s uprising, solidarity, Sri Lanka, When Memory Dies
