ABSTRACT
In critiquing a land-locked bias that pervaded early Sri Lankan scholarship, this chapter outlines formative work on fishing communities, together with wartime and tsunami-related scholarship on coastal politics. Given the un/making Sri Lanka's “islandness”, it proceeds to interweave recent writing on transoceanic circulations, Indian Ocean world connectivities, decolonial island studies, and multispecies theorisations. Drawing on the merits of “following” scholarly marine currents – as both metaphor and method – the chapter calls for more conceptually plural and thematically integrative lines of inquiry that advance debates on more-than-human entanglements (of people, species, and places), together with emergent forms of coastal urbanity and urbanisation.
