My dissertation examines the implications of diasporic histories on the genealogy of Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009) and its post-war afterlife through the work of three Tamil diasporic artists: Thamotharampillai Sanathanan, Matangi Maya Arulpragasam, and Joshua Vettivelu. Sri Lanka’s war disproportionately devastated regions with Tamil-majority populations, thus producing a vast diaspora of Tamil asylum seekers around the world. I focus on Tamil diasporic artistic practices to examine the multiplicity of geographies and temporalities that emerged over decades of war, for which the categories of diaspora and nation cannot be cleanly separated. While this framework contributes to theoretical trajectories in diaspora studies, it departs from contemporary art historical scholarship on Sri Lanka, which often prioritizes artists located within its national borders. Sanathanan, for example, is the only artist in my dissertation whose practice has been historicized within Sri Lanka’s art historical scholarship. Even though he may not identify as part of the Tamil diaspora, I nevertheless analyze his practice as diasporic to consider how diasporic subjectivity manifests within Sri Lanka itself. A key goal of this dissertation is to demonstrate the utility of diaspora studies as a method for interrogating the binaries through which Sri Lanka’s history of war is often understood: as a fight between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); as a fight between two competing, extreme ethnic nationalisms (Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism and Tamil nationalism); or, in the aftermath of 9/11, as a fight between “democracy” and “terror.” While these binaries render key antagonisms across three decades of war more legible, they also obscure structural causes of the outbreak of violence that span the island’s colonial and post-colonial history. Art history has a specific contribution to make to this history in that how we perceive and narrate the history of war in Sri Lanka is a question of representation, as evidenced by the pervasive images of monuments, political figureheads, maps, and more that make up the official narratives of war. By highlighting how contemporary artists disrupt these narratives, this dissertation seeks to expose some of the contradictions, fissures, and erasures in historical accountings of the war and the configurations of power that undergird them.