Affective Justice for an Ineffective Transition: Visceral, Vicarious Responsibility in Paangshu and Demons in Paradise

This chapter analyzes two Sri Lankan films — the fiction film Paangshu (2018) and the documentary Demons in Paradise (2017) — that show how the country’s best-known militant groups, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front or JVP) and Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), practiced violence against their own communities in the name of Sinhala and Tamil liberation respectively. Both films recover traumatic counter-memories and recuperate uncomfortable counter-narratives that have been largely forgotten or silenced within the Sinhala and Tamil communities. Most importantly, they reveal how ordinary Sinhala and Tamils are implicated in the violence that was committed in their names. Both films exemplify what is conceptualized here as “affective transitional justice”: they challenge ethnicized victim-perpetrator binaries, cultivate collective responsibility for intra-ethnic violence, and question the sufficiency of legal-rationalist transitional justice. Taken together, the films help create a shared story of mutual suffering among Sri Lankans — one that just might provide a foundational narrative for a (re)imagined community one day.