This paper puts forward a broadly postcolonial method for engaging with landscapes in South Asia, in this case southern Sri Lanka. It argues that, as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually. In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka's most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka's south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art's sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape's more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala—Buddhist hegemony. Indeed, I show how some of the familiar (Eurocentric) concept-metaphors that we might intuitively bring to a reading of this landscape—namely ‘nature’, ‘religion’, and ‘ksubjectivity’—hold at arm's length particular kinds of landscape politics that emerge from differently textualized human relationships with the environment. The paper charts a method responsive to this particular landscape, and by doing so insists on the difficult task of retaining the singularity of landscapes positioned beyond the Euro-American staging grounds of the conceptual debates current within contemporary cultural geography.
AndersonB., 2006, “Becoming and being hopeful: Towards a theory of affect”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space24733–752
2.
BarnesTDuncanJ (Eds), 1992Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (Routledge, London)
3.
BawaGBonCSansoniD, 1990Lunuganga (Times New Edition, Singapore)
4.
BerleantA, 1992The Aesthetics of Environment (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA)
5.
BishopP, 1993Dreams of Power: Tibetan Buddhism and the Western Imagination (Athlone Press, London)
6.
BrennanT, 1997At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)
7.
ChakrabartyD, 2002Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
8.
CheeLChangJ HWongB C T, 2011, “Introduction—‘Tropicality-in-motion’: Situating tropical architecture”Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography32277–282
9.
ConnellR, 2007Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Allen and Unwin, Sydney)
10.
CoomaraswamyA K, 1964 [1916] Buddha and the Gospel of Buddhism (Harper Torchbooks, New York)
11.
CosgroveD, 1984Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Croom Helm, London)
12.
CosgroveDDanielsS (Eds), 1988The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge)
13.
DanielsS, 1994Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in England and the United States (Polity Press, Cambridge)
DriverFMartinsL (Eds), 2005Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL)
19.
DuncanJ, 1990The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (University of Cambridge Press, Cambridge)
20.
EpsteinM, 2007Psychotherapy Without the Self: A Buddhist Perspective (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT)
21.
GoadPPierisA (Eds), 2005New Directions in Tropical Asian Architecture (Periplus, Singapore)
22.
GoonewardenaK, 2002, “Aborted identity: The commission and omission of a monument to the nation, circa 1989”Radical History Review winter 2002 (82) 141–156
23.
GuhaR, 1999 [1983] Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Duke University Press, Durham, NC)
24.
HowittRSuchet-PearsonS, 2006, “Rethinking the building blocks: Ontological pluralism and the idea of ‘management’”Geografiska Annaler88323–335
25.
IsmailQ, 2005Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place and Postcoloniality (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis)
JazeelTMcFarlaneC, 2010, “The limits of responsibility: A postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series35109–124
30.
JeganathanP, 2004, ‘Disco-very: Anthropology, nationalist thought, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, and an uncertain descent into the ordinary’, in Violence Ed. WhiteheadN (School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM) pp 185–202
31.
KemperS, 1991The Presence of the Past: Chronicles, Politics and Culture in Sinhala Life (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY)
32.
KingA J, 2004Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture and Urban Identity (Routledge, London)
33.
KlostermaierK, 1991, “The nature of Buddhism”Asian Philosophy129–38
34.
StepanLeys N, 2001Picturing Tropical Nature (Reaktion, London)
35.
LorimerH, 2005, “Cultural geography: The busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’”, Progress in Human Geography2983–94
36.
McCormackD, 2003, “An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series4488–507
37.
McFarlaneC, 2009, “Translocal assemblages: Space, power and social movements”Geoforum40561–567
NoxoloPRaghuramPMadgeC, 2012, “Unsettling responsibility: Postcolonial interventions”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series33418–429
41.
ObeyesekereG, 1970, “Religious symbolism and political change in Ceylon”Modern Ceylon Studies11–27
42.
PereraN, 2009, “Rebuilding lives, undermining oppositions: Spaces of war and peace in Sri Lanka”, in Spatialising Politics: Culture and Geography in Postcolonial Sri Lanka Eds BrunCJazeelT (Sage, New Delhi) pp 168–193
43.
PierisA, 2007a, “Modernism at the margins of the vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekera”Grey Room2856–85
44.
PierisA, 2007bImagining Modernity: The Architecture of Valentine Gunasekera (Stamford Lake and Social Social Scientist's Association, Colombo)
45.
PierisA, 2011, “Tropical cosmopolitanism? The untoward legacy of the American style in postindependence Ceylon/Sri Lanka”Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography32332–349
46.
PrakashG, 2011Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
47.
RobsonD, 2002Geoffrey Bawa: The Complete Works (Thames and Hudson, London)
48.
RobsonD, 2007Beyond Bawa: Modern Masterworks of Monsoon Asia (Thames and Hudson, London)
49.
RobsonD, 2008Bawa: The Sri Lanka Gardens (Thames and Hudson, London)
50.
SaidE, 1983The World, the Text, and the Critic (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)
51.
ScottD, 1999Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
52.
ScottD, 2000, “Toleration and historical traditions of difference”, in Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender, Violence Eds ChatterjeePJeganathanP (Columbia University Press, New York) pp 283–304
53.
SethS, 2007, “Changing the subject: Western knowledge and the question of difference”Comparative Studies in Society and History49666–688
54.
SlaterD, 1992, “On the borders of social theory: Learning from other regions”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space10307–327
55.
SparkeM, 2005In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-state (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
56.
SpencerJ, 1990Sri Lanka: History and the Roots of Conflict (Routledge, London)
57.
SpivakG C, 1993Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge, London)
58.
SpivakG C, 1995, “Translator's Preface”, in Imaginary MapsDeviM, translated by SpivakG C (Routledge, London) pp xxiii–xxix
59.
SpivakG C, 1999A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA)
60.
SpivakG C, 2008Other Asias (Blackwell, Oxford)
61.
ThriftNDewsburyJ D, 2000, “Dead geographies—and how to make them live”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space18411–432
62.
Tolia-KellyD, 2006, “Affect—an ethnocentric encounter? Exploring the ‘universalist’ imperative of emotional/affectual geographies”Area38213–217
63.
WeissG, 2011The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers (Bodley Head, London)
64.
WilliamsR, 1977Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, Oxford)
65.
WilliamsR, 1983Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Revised Edition (Oxford University Press, Oxford)
66.
WylieJ, 2005, “A single day's walking: Narrating self and landscape on the SouthWest Coast Path”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers: New Series30234–247
67.
WylieJ, 2007Landscape (Routledge, London)
68.
WylieJRoseM, 2006, “Animating landscape”Environment and Planning D: Society and Space24475–479
