Books by Qadri Ismail

The conviction that we all have, possess or inhabit a discrete culture, and have done so for centuries, is one of the more dominant default assumptions of our contemporary politico-intellectual moment. However, the concept of culture as a signifier of subjectivity only entered the modern Anglo-U.S. episteme in the late nineteenth century. Culture and Eurocentrism seeks to account for the term's relatively recent emergence and movement through the episteme, networked with many other concepts nature, race, society, imagination, savage, and civilization at the confluence of several disciplines. Culture, it contends, doesn't describe difference but produces it, hierarchically. In so doing, it seeks to recharge postcoloniality, the critique of eurocentrism.

An account of Sri Lankan politics and representative democracies. The lack of peace in Sri Lanka is portrayed as a consequence of a violent, ethnonationalist conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. This book examines how the disciplines of anthropology, history, and literature treat the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict.