Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya

Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya

De Silva Jayasuriya attended the University of London where she received a BSc in Economics and a MSc in Finance and the University of Westminster where she received a Ph.D.

Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya is an esteemed writer, scholar, filmmaker, editor, and musician, that focuses on things such as commerce, migration, and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean that specializes in music, linguistics, and history.

She won the Distinguished Rama Watumull Collaborative Lecture Series award and Excellence and Diversity Award from University of Hawaii.

Shihan’s expertise spans advocacy and academia in higher education sectors and international NGOs including the ICOMOS, UN, and UNESCO. She’s recognized as a UN expert on Afro descendants in Asia and she’s contributed significantly to the UNESCO Slave Route Project.

Her articles, monographs, and books concern folks of African descent in Asia, both contemporary and historical, cultural interactions in the Indian Ocean, music and language.

Her edited special volumes have been published in such international journals including: Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage and Musike, and African and Asian Studies.

Shihan’s ethnographic films have been screened at international venues, and they shed light on the global African diaspora and Creole cultures. Her research encompasses Sri Lanka Malay and Portuguese burgher peoples language and culture and Sri Lankan society at large.

Shihan has also worked on a study of the Sri Lanka Portuguese dialect encapsulated in the oral traditions of African descendants.

African identity in Asia. Contrasting to the dispersion of slaves across the Atlantic, African movement to Asia has received scant attention since forced migrations across the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, which endured for centuries, weren’t a part of any significant economic network.

But Britain’s 2007 commemoration of the bicentennial of its abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade has now stimulated a bit of interest in other African migrations.

Here is a book that encompasses the strong military impact that was made by even first-generation African migrants in Asia, and the descendants of the royal Africans that governed Janjira and Sachin. Shihan also further demonstrates that African dance and music have not just survived the brutalities of forced migration yet also contributed to the local Middle Eastern and South Asian art scenes.

Despite spirit possession ceremonies have been preserved as a form of cultural identity, blended and new forms of music which evolved in Asia have become indigenized in the host countries.

Forced African migrants have also become inadvertent cultural brokers between two continents. Combining historical accounts (both oral and written) this groundbreaking book explores through case studies as well as through the processes of assimilation, social mobility, and marginalization, the conflicting identity and silent history of Asia’s Africans.

Shihan De Silva Jayasuriya: F.A.Q