أطراس
Volume 7, Numéro 2, Pages 310-320
2026-07-15
Native Man As Threat: Colonialist Echoes In Anne Ranasinghe’s Creative Work
Authors : Perera Vihanga .
Abstract
Anne Ranasinghe (née Annalise Katz) is a German-Jewish who migrated to Ceylon with her Ceylonese spouse whom she had met in exile in Britain after World War II. Over four and a half decades, Ranasinghe became a prominent English-language poet and story writer in her adopted country and became prominent in the country’s English literary world. Ranasinghe’s poems and stories are widely considered for their sensitivity of place, and the writer’s acceptance of local culture. Scholarly assessment of Ranasinghe’s work is normally that of a writer with empathy towards the common folk. The present study makes a radical reassessment of such convictions by understanding some of Ranasinghe’s work as representing a perceived threat from native men on European / socialite women of her social milieu. This motif is resonant of the “black rapist” myth of territories colonized and settled by European powers between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries; including the United States. Comparable vibrations can be found in Ranasinghe’s work including the stories “Desire” and “The Ambassador’s Wife”, and the poem “At What Dark Point” which the study uses for textual analysis. Placing Ranasinghe’s work against other contemporary postcolonial works for anchorage, the discussion presents a textual examination of Ranasinghe’s creative writing to broaden the reception of her work.
Keywords
Postcolonial Literature ; Sri Lankan Literature ; Black Rapist ; Colonial Gaze
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