Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka

Sandya Hewamanne is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. She is the author of Sri Lanka's Global Factory Workers: (Un)Disciplined Desires and Sexual Struggles in a Post Colonial Society. Her Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka is also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

"The book is an enjoyable read, in particular the narratives of the aspirations, successes, difficulties, relationships, and negotiations in the women's lives. This has much to do with Hewamanne's fieldwork, carried out over years of visits and drawing on research techniques and materials, interactions, and friendships that require time to build and the reflexivity that time can enable...[T]his is a substantial and worthwhile read for all those concerned with a gamut of themes related to gender, work and economic activity, neoliberal processes, migration, subjectivity, emotion, agency, and cultural negotiations." (American Journal of Sociology) "The value of Hewamanne's new book lies in the ethnographic detail of the 37 respondents that she follows, where initial friendships and connections morph into a research constituency… The book helps to better appreciate the ways in which gendered subjectivities manifest through ongoing societal transformation." (Progress in Development Studies) "What happens when women free-trade-zone factory workers retire and return to rural villages? Restitching Identities in Rural Sri Lanka provides one of the first studies to address this timely question as it offers a fascinating account of women's navigation of the competing gender cultural norms of factory and village." (Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, author of Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work) "Sandya Hewamanne is a superlative ethnographer of former free-trade-zone garment workers who return to their villages all over Sri Lanka with independent earnings and networking skills that they use to craft well-being for more than themselves. Hewamanne's depiction of their 'politics of contentment' is a powerful contribution to feminist political economy." (Ann Kingsolver, University of Kentucky) "Many scholars have studied labor migration and women's integration into industrial capitalism. Fewer, however, have taken the next step to follow the workers back to their homes. This original aspect of Sandya Hewamanne's book provides a significant contribution to scholarship in gender studies and economic anthropology. Connecting work in the international market with social change in rural villages is exciting and new." (Michele Gamburd, Portland State University) "This volume builds on the author's successful, and in many ways innovative, Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone. Fresh and original, the stories that unfold in the course of this book are vivid, surprising, and affecting." (Jonathan Spencer, Edinburgh University)