False binaries and true fictions: An ethnographic examination of what the Sri Lankan Tamil refugee characters in Shobasakthi's literature reveal about European asylum regimes

Abstract

This paper analyses the film and literary works of Paris‐based actor and author Shobasakthi, the pen name of Antonythasan Jesuthasan, as ethnographic texts in dialogue with anthropological scholarship on asylum and European migration. Shobasakthi, himself a Sri Lankan Tamil political refugee in France, is one of the leading contemporary Tamil literary figures worldwide. I focus particularly on Shobasakthi's literature in English and French translation, and on the 2015 Palme d'Or winning film Dheepan , to examine the experiences of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees. I argue that through Shobasakthi's fictional depictions of the asylum process, a space for truth‐telling is opened, which challenges the dominant framing of contemporary European asylum regimes: that a small group of “real refugees,” who are morally pure, but voiceless and devoid of agency, is to be winnowed from a mass of “false refugees” whose appeal to humanitarian conscience is seen as a cynical ruse and a threat to refugee‐receiving nations. While the figure of the “false refugee” permits a disavowal of the exclusionary framework of European migration regimes, Shobasakthi's work depicts the complex humanity of his Sri Lankan Tamil refugee characters, as well as the psychological and sometimes physical violence of the asylum process itself.