The South Asia Journal for Culture held its Pakistan launch on October 26 2008 at the Goethe Institut, Karachchi, organized by the Goethe Institut and Nukta Art. It was organized as part of the South Asia art critics seminar titled ‘The Anxious Century: Discourses Waiting to be Born.’

Sasanka Perera addressed the audience. Following is an excerpt of his address: 

“…when the South Asia Journal for Culture is being launched in Karachi, let me also talk a little bit about the politics of marginality because in many ways this journal is an idea that came into existence from within the politics and experiences of marginality as well as the frustrations contextualized earlier.  For us, that is Colombo Institute and Theertha International Artists Collective, as two organizations that have worked very closely for the last three years, marginality is a fact of life even though it is not something we have ever considered a domain within which we would be forever imprisoned. In fact, in retrospect, it is clear that it has been the most fundamental force that has invigorated us to do most of what we have done in recent times.  What I mean by marginality for us worked at two levels: due to the political changes that took place in Sri Lanka since the 1960s and the resultant brain drain to the former colonial centers, much of the work in the social sciences and humanities produced in Sri Lanka, particularly in the local languages, tended to be pedestrian at best. Most local journals of quality folded up or their work was severely restricted and downgraded. This was one marginality within which we had to work: in other words, we had to work within a relative lack of stimulation in the local intellectual environment. The second marginality was far more encompassing. We found it difficult to access regional and global journals and publishers due to the restrictive work of intellectual gate-keepers who seem to take pride in thinking, experiencing and feeling on our behalf.  In this same context, it was not unusual to have conferences in the region itself that were supposedly South Asian in focus but politically marginal entities such as Sri Lanka were often represented by postcolonials who had fled from the periphery to the centers long ago, or were not represented at all.  Again, there was a problem of representation of both our experiences and our thinking. But these marginalities did not necessarily translate into mediocrity for those few who were perhaps mad enough to create alternate structures and process.

“Therefore this journal is the result of felt needs and anticipated political and ideological expectations and the logical culmination of a specific history.  Talking of history, make no mistake — this is a Sri Lankan effort given that we were responding to locally felt marginalities and frustrations on the one hand. But it was also a South Asian initiative on the other because we were very keen and conscious that the knowledge produced within South Asian and on South Asia should also be known widely in South Asia as well as globally. This is not a mere yearning for a collective South Asian cultural and intellectual identity. More broadly, this was a matter of taking stock of what we think, what we critique, what we question and what we learn about ourselves and the world and finding means to make this knowledge part of the global academic discourse as well. “