Refugee Memory As Resistance

Refugee Memory as Resistance tells the powerful story of Tamils who fled the Sri Lankan civil war in the 1980s and 1990s and rebuilt their lives in new countries, including Australia. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival research across Australia, the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka, the book explores how war, displacement and resettlement are lived and remembered across generations and borders. What happens when people carry stories that states have tried to erase, silence and distort? The voices of Tamil refugees reveal how persecution, loss, belonging and survival shape personal identity and collective history. Author Niro Kandasamy travels the long roots of Tamil marginalisation in Sri Lanka, while also showing how refugees encounter new forms of exclusion from the places in which they sought safety. The book offers an urgent account of how memory becomes a form of resistance, of how remembering is not only an act of reflection but a way for refugees to preserve culture and dignity, forge belonging and challenge the political forces that seek to redefine them. Refugee Memory as Resistance highlights the power of storytelling to reclaim what history has tried to silence.