Transcultural memory and identity: Reconstructing film spectatorship in Tamil refugee resettlement experiences

Abstract

ABSTRACT Eelam Tamils have a growing connection with Indian Tamils through shared language, cultural heritage, history, and cosmology, despite not having a shared geography or homeland. This paper contributes to understanding this peculiar connection by focusing on the cultural impacts of Indian Tamil films on Eelam Tamil refugees resettled in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on the existing scholarship on pan-Tamil identity, memory, and film, the paper asks: how did consuming Tamil films affect Eelam Tamils’ cultural identities in their refugee resettlement? Transcultural memory is used as a framework to examine this interaction and the multi-focal identities and orientations among Eelam Tamils towards pan-Tamilness. Tamil refugees used film in a novel way to recall difficult memories of the pressures felt by a young war generation to sustain their cultural heritage while adjusting to the cultural norms of Australia. Consuming films become formative to reconstructing their cultural identities and enables the possibilities for exploring the cultural linkages and disconnections that constitute the heterogeneity of pan-Tamil subjectivities.