Valuing the 'neighbourhood': Responding to Racialised Post-War Development in Slave Island, Colombo

Abstract

This article explores how Slave Island, a neighbourhood in Colombo, Sri Lanka, responds to upheaval in a context of post-war urban transformation that masks undertones of racialisation. Through life histories of Slave Island’s multigenerational residents, we offer fresh insights into how communities navigate the uncertainty and disruption of evictions, where besides material and economic infrastructure, communities repurpose differences and commonalities built on lineage and place-memory, to (re)negotiate their ‘borders’ as they interact with ‘outsiders’. By adapting the internal and external boundaries of their community and its members, they find creative methods of positioning themselves to access development dividends in how they understand and utilise notions of ‘value’—instrumental, commercial and intrinsic. In this way, we show that raced interventions are not simply experienced as subordination but are repurposed transactionally by affected communities for negotiating their agentive power over distribution of development dividends.