ABSTRACT
Colombo is Sri Lanka’s most populous, most diverse, and most politically, culturally, and economically inuential city. It owes its preeminence in no small part to its development under the Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonizers of Sri Lanka into a colonial capital and a site through which transnational capital owed during the colonial era and continues to ow now. Carl Muller, one of Sri Lanka’s most prolic post-independence Anglophone novelists, has devoted much of his career to exploring the complicated colonial legacy of Sri Lanka, particularly by exploring the history of the Burghers (Sri Lankan Eurasians of Dutch and Portuguese descent) before and after independence. In one of his more unusual works, Colombo: A Novel, Muller presses against generic, temporal, and political boundaries in order to explore the persistence of violence, inequality, exploitation, and exclusion in Sri Lanka’s commercial capital during the second half of the twentieth century.
